Selectors need to go

Rex Clementine in Trivandrum

One-day cricket has been played for more than 50 years now and there have been over 4500 matches in this format and Sunday in the southern Indian city of Trivandrum we witnessed history as India bowled out Sri Lanka for a paltry 73 runs. The 317-run defeat is the heaviest in the history of the game by any team. This is no more an embarrassment. This is beyond repair.

The national selection panel’s flawed strategies have led us into this mess. Sri Lanka are unlikely to qualify automatically for this year’s World Cup and they could even miss out on playing the World Cup later this year if they have a horrible run in the qualifiers.

If that were to happen it would be a crying shame for a team that had reached three 50 over World Cup finals in the last 25 years winning it once.

The selectors should have stepped down when their decision to retain the injured Danushka Gunathilaka backfired in Australia and the player ended up in jail bringing shame to the entire nation. But they carried on regardless and Sunday’s result is further proof that their policies have doomed the sport that we all love.

In the last two years, there has been a lack of transparency and maybe this is an effort to target certain players.

When Dimuth Karunaratne was called back to play ODI cricket in 2019 having not played that format for more than four years, there was sound reasoning. It was explained that batting had too many collapses and the team needed someone to hold one end up. Then when the current panel came in they blamed Karunaratne saying that he was slowing down the innings conveniently forgetting why he had been brought in in the first place – to play the anchor role.

The selectors’ could be acting as cat’s paws of some individuals and they may not necessarily be board officials. Someone who doesn’t have the guts to call the shots directly may be using the national selection panel to settle scores.

Don’t forget that Karunaratne and other senior players were in the midst of a contracts row for bringing down salaries. All of a sudden you find them exiled from white ball cricket and we are told that there are concerns about fitness and that 50 and 20 over formats are a young man’s game.

Yes, 20 overs you can accept that argument but 50 overs is a different kettle of fish and you need some experience in your side.

Then, having flaunted so much on fitness being paramount and non-negotiable we find that fitness is no more a yardstick for selection. Unfit players are tolerated and the much-hyped fitness regime had been thrown out of the window. It’s a cock and bull story and secretly scores have been settled.

The fact of the matter is players like Dimuth and Angelo have not failed any fitness tests but the younger ones who have failed have found slots in the national cricket team. That’s simply not cricket!

Selectors behave like petty thieves retaliating to certain actions of players. You need a wise head of a Sidath Wettimuny who took on bigger boys aftermath of the 1999 World Cup campaign but didn’t burn bridges and took them to Pakistan because the Wasims and Waqars aren’t for the faint-hearted. In the end, a veteran helped Sri Lanka over the line with a broken finger and blood on the pitch.

Even Michael Tissera, Ashantha de Mel and Aravinda de Silva who have headed selection panels in recent years have diplomatically solved many a delicate issue. During their tenures, there was good communication and transparency. Players were challenged but never ever harshly treated. The current selection panel has not addressed a single media briefing to explain their policies. They are simply groping in the dark and the sport suffers.

We follow England’s blueprint for the 50-over format that they used in 1990s. The results have been horrible. England depended on too many all-rounders, in Sanjay Manjrekar’s words ‘bits and pieces cricketers’. There’s no way that in a playing eleven you can have four all-rounders. Despite this strategy backfiring time and time again they stick to it and it’s time that fresh thinking is brought in to take the game forward.