Where have all the fans gone?  

by Rex Clementine  

When you travel to West Indies, you often find a lot of cricket fans who are no longer interested in visiting the grounds to watch their team play. Once a team feared by all and sundry, the West Indies have currently become also rans unable to compete with top teams. They failed to qualify for last year’s World Cup.

We all grew up marveling and admiring West Indies. So much so Kumar Sangakkara once said that when West Indies played Sri Lanka, he wasn’t sure which team to support. Sanga of course is not alone. There are many of us who wished that we could bat like Viv Richards and wanted to bowl like Malcolm Marshall.

When you are looking at the crowds for the current Zimbabwe series, you wonder whether Sri Lankan fans are heading in the same direction as the West Indies fans. Woe be the day if that happens.

The cricket team of course is no doubt desperately trying to play like West Indies of present. Discipline and commitment are lacking  and the management is tolerating players taking short cuts instead of putting in hard yards. The Consultant Coach who has been in the job for over two years now is complaining about skill levels being not there among the current generation. He is of course beating around the bush not putting in enough time himself to dig the sport out of the current mess.

We do not wish to be doomsday prophets, but when spectators turn away from the game it’s a bad sign. Lack of interest for the game could be many fold. It may be that these days T-20s receive more attention than ODIs. People aren’t bothered anymore to spend eight hours in the ground and are happier with three hours of cricket which T-20 gives. They will be back for the T-20s.

Maybe that this is Zimbabwe and spectators aren’t interested. Maybe the cost of living is making everyone feel the pinch.

All these could be contributory factors for lack of spectators at games, but you cannot deny the fact that people are fed up with the game. We are in urgent need for role models; characters who will not only entertain but those who put us in the world map.

Cricket gave us enormous joy. Time was when India feared our batters like the plague and England ran out of ideas to contain our batters. Today we are marveling at the skills of Virat Kohli and Joe Root while the guardians of our sport are happy that we are beating UAE, Oman, Ireland and Scotland. Good luck to them.

The blame of course shouldn’t be rested on the administration alone. Sure, they have made some blunders. They have handed the captaincy to wrong guys, taken the sting out of domestic competitions by doubling the First-Class teams and spent colossal amounts of money on vanity projects without developing the game. The players themselves need to take a fair share of the blame.

Most current cricketers come from humble backgrounds. Their road towards the national cricket team is faced with many hardships but once they get there, they find a comfort zone and rarely do you see them pushing boundaries.

Lack of leadership within the team is one main reason why standards have dropped, and performances have gone down. From time to time, we have brought in individuals to fix the mess, but they have let the sport and the fans down badly entertaining their own whims and fancies. Time is running out and unless we address these issues Sri Lankan cricket will head the same way of West Indies.