Basking in past glories

By Rex Clementine

Some cricket buffs may forget their wife’s birthday, but they will never forget March 17th or to a lesser extent April 6th. One was the day when Sri Lanka won the Wills World Cup in Lahore and the latter was when they won the World T-20 in Dhaka. Thursday marked the ninth anniversary of Sri Lanka being crowned as champions in T-20 cricket and Sanga and MJ quit on a high.

From 2007 to 2014 in the seven-year period Sri Lanka were so consistent in ICC events they reached five World Cup finals. Although there were heartbreaks in four of them, 2014 brought lot of relief. In that period even when the team didn’t reach the finals, they had done well finishing in the last four and so on. Even in Test cricket Sri Lanka were pretty consistent. It was also in the year 2014 they won their first ever Test series in England and two years later whitewashed Aussies 3-0.

We can not just put the blame on the administration and close the book. At that point when the team was winning everything the administration was far worse perhaps.

So you are left with the question what has been the root cause for a team that was so consistent to suddenly lose its bearings unable to automatically qualify for ICC events. Mind you Sri Lanka had to play the qualifying round in the last two T-20 World Cups and now will be doing the same in the 50 over format. What a pity for a proud cricketing nation.

You don’t expect your team to reach the finals every time but the least you can do is to qualify for the event automatically, which can only happen if you maintain healthy rankings, winning bilateral series consistently.

To start with you obviously don’t have the skillful players that you had yesteryear. Sanga, MJ, T.M. Dilshan, Rangana Herath and Lasith Malinga were all match winners and they were well backed up by other skillful players.

Currently we don’t have that many match winners and that’s been one major reason for the sloppy show. Secondly, even the ones who are capable of winning us games like Angelo Mathews have been given the cold shoulder resulting in the status quo while other key performers like Kusal Perera have not been looked after well.

Our selection policies have been flawed and unless we bring in someone with a proven track record like Sidath Wettimuny, Marvan Atapattu or Aravinda de Silva  we are going to struggle.Obviously teams like India have taken their cricket to a new level thanks to the IPL. For teams like England and Australia the transition period when their key players retire and new ones take over is much less compared to teams like Sri Lanka’s as their domestic cricket is strong.

The least said about our domestic cricket the better it is. We have introduced a provincial tournament called National Super League to address the woes as the best players in the clubs tournament compete in this elite competition. But what’s the point if players who have performed well there don’t get a go at international cricket? Young Sadeera Samarawickrama for example toured both India and New Zealand but was warming the bench.

You tend to get the feeling that the generation before this that brought us much international fame was far more committed and disciplined than the current one. If you see the current lot quite a few of them have been sanctioned for indiscipline and you don’t drive home a point when suspensions are ended prematurely. Probably that’s an area we need to look at.