Silverwood pleased Mendis has turned a corner

Rex Clementine
in Sydney

Although Sri Lanka failed to progress beyond the Super 12 stage of the ICC T-20 World Cup, there were quite a few positives for Dasun Shanaka’s team. Sri Lanka’s campaign ended in Sydney following their four wicket loss to England on Saturday. Although a win wouldn’t have been sufficient for the team to go through to semis, had Sri Lanka won, England would have got knocked out and hosts and defending champions Australia gone through.

Head Coach Chris Silverwood was pleased with the contributions of opening batsman Kusal Mendis. It was a big call by the team to hand Mendis the wicketkeeping gloves and promote him to open batting. The 27-year-old didn’t disappoint ending the tournament as the highest run getter with 223 runs. By the end of the finals, other players would have gone past Mendis, but for a player who had lacked consistency; his form in the World Cup was a huge relief.

“Very happy with the contributions of Mendis. He’s got to top order and kept tidily. And we’re very pleased with him. I’m very pleased with the top quarter in general, the way they built the platform for us, to go from the power that we’ve got so five, six, seven left.”

Disappointingly for Sri Lanka, Bhanuka Rajapaksa, Dasun Shanaka and Wanindu Hasaranga were well below par throughout the campaign as the batting unit failed to cash in the good starts the top order had given.While Mendis finished as the top run getter of the tournament, Pathum Nissanka finished fourth with 214 runs to his name in seven innings. The 24-year-old scored two half-centuries.

“We’ve seen Pathum go from strength to strength. It’s not always been easy for him. But what he does, he fights hard and works hard in the nets. Practices well, practices with purpose. You see that coming out in his game now. All the runs he’s scoring will give him confidence. Hopefully that will gel that top order together,” Silverwood explained.

Injuries to six players was a massive let down for Sri Lanka’s campaign with four fast bowlers being sent home. Silverwood stressed that the issue of injuries will be discussed but did not go into details, “I’m not going to go into too many of them right now because obviously that would be unfair. But certainly there are things we will be looking for, what we can do better, how we can improve on that, because it makes life difficult when you pick up so many injuries. But how do we minimize that?

The Sydney wicket favoured spin heavily and Sri Lanka used 13 overs of spin bringing even Charith Asalanka into the equation while seamer Chamika Karunaratne didn’t even get a chance to bowl. “We always had obviously three spinners in the group anyway. And Charith, a good backup there. To go with the extra spinner would have looked very unbalanced. Had it not worked, we would have been stuck. We wanted to make sure we had a bit of variety in the attack as well.

Fielding had been a huge let down for Sri Lanka but finally it came good with some brilliant catching and Silverwood admitted it was a work in progress.

“Fielding is something that we need to work on. We’re not going to shy away from that. It’s not something that we’ve hidden from either, talking to the press, anything like that. It’s an ongoing process and something we must get better at.”