By Leonard Ratnayake
Sri Lanka cricket is in turmoil. They continue to be a loosing side. Player performances are far below their potentials and expectations. As a nation, Sri Lanka cricket is now tagged the virtual or the real under-dogs status going into any given tournament with any composition or combination made. They seem to lack the correct strategy and the right methods of implementation or some may correctly term it as “the lack of will and the thirst for success.”
The resources are plenty even though the Sri Lanka cricket coach wanted to enjoy the luxury of having a bunch of world’s top-ranked players in the team. The availability of sufficient talent is obvious, the facilities are in place, the supporting staff is around them even to collect a dropping hankie and the perks are overwhelming. Ultimately, all what’s left is to go out there and move their butts just about to bat, bowl and field with commitment. Done this well, we could have easily had over five top-ranking players in the world and a winning cricket team.
But in Sri Lanka, it happens the other way around. Nowadays, being just a national cricketer, one has got it all, more and abundantly in their lives. To the extent that a 40-year-old Kumar Sangakkara, who had only played cricket so far being in front and behind a wicket in his life, is considered fit and demanded to run country’s cricket administration and even to hold top most executive presidency in Sri Lanka. For Sangakkara, being an outstanding cricketer from late 90s and making his debut only in 2000, he and few other know, how much of commitment, dedication and sacrifices it demanded to make him for what he is today. But, when a country’s cricketer reaches this climax, the rest of the sheep want to follow suit to enjoy the perquisites, turning a blind-eye to their hardships in early days, also because the path was well-leveled by predecessors.
I may be wrong to say this, but I see the above as the cause for this sad situation that ails Sri Lanka cricket at the moment. Enjoying a national contract of as a cricketer and being in the first fifteen, has just gifted it all to one’s life. So the pursuit is solely to get the SLC contract and moreover into the first 15 to enjoy other perks. Thus, as Sri Lankans, the contest is open merely among the fellow cricketers and hardly as a team and against another nation.
The recent stripping off of Sri Lanka’s most prolific cricketer at the moment, Angelo Mathews from captaincy and eventual ousting from the team too, was explained as a solution to steady the ship in troubled waters, but more of a sacrifice of a biblical story Jonah after being termed as Judah. On record, Mathews is Sri Lanka’s most successful cricketer available, a resource that every coach would like to enjoy having the services, but in reality, it was the same coach, who recalled and reinstated to take the ship forward, asked for his resignation as the gospel according to Matthew 21:42-43 read “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to people who will produce its fruit.”
Angelo Mathews, spotted as Sri Lanka’s most resourceful cricketer for the future and undoubtedly, the most thriving at present, is however made to swallow by the whale as he was termed to be Jonah in Sri Lanka cricket. To add salt to the wounds, it is apparently known among the cricketing circles; he is also murmured, pointed at and rather questioned in match-fixing sagas, thus receiving the role of Judah in the cricket team.
Nevertheless, given the current context in country’s cricket; where no player seems to be tiring themselves for the country but for personal agendas, Mathews cannot be easily sidelined from the team until he carries his bat against the ball. The only way to send him out would be when Angelo decides to follow the scripture of Matthew 11:28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
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