Sports

Sports

A silver penny for a cricket thought
By Ranil Abeynaike
After a reasonably good showing in Australia and having defeated Bangladesh in their own territory, Sri Lanka slipped down the greasy pole in their two one day encounters against Pakistan. In the one day a short spell of bad cricket can let the game slip out of a team’s grasp. Try as you may it then becomes an impossible task to regain lost ground.

Sri Lanka faltered on two counts in these two games. Their batsmen did not alter their game to suit the pitches that they came up against. Their batsmen did not go on after making starts, after doing the hard work. In the first concluded game they fell short by about thirty runs and in the second by about fifty runs. On both occasions they were well capable of getting those runs.

The arrangement of the team suffered from the outset. First, Sanath Jayasuriya, Chaminda Vaas and Ruchira Perera pulled out due to injury on the eve of the opening game. Then captain Marvan Atapattu made himself unavailable due to a recurring back injury. In terms of ability and experience Atapattu, Jayasuriya and Vaas occupy about forty percent of the teams strength. Perera bowled well in Australia and could have been a handful for the visitors. In the past seven months a number of new faces have emerged and some others who have fallen by the wayside some time ago have re-emerged. Some players have lost their way while question marks are placed in front of the names of some seniors. From the selections made for the Bangladesh tour the selectors were looking ahead to the future. Now they have a reasonably clear picture having seen many players.

Still the pieces of the jigsaw are all over the place. The main concern must be the senior players Marvan Atapattu, Muttiah Muralitharan, Sanath Jayasuriya, Chaminda Vaas and Russell Arnold. Collectively they have made tremendous contribution to Sri Lankan cricket. The questions to ask are many. How long will the form and contributions of these players last? What about their fitness? Are the young players in the pipeline capable of taking the next step? How soon should the transition take place?

Obviously the transition will be somewhat of a staggered process. All these players will not go out together. Some may be around for awhile longer than the others. Some may continue in one form of the game or other. Whatever said and done the team is going through a period of transition and the sooner the core players for the test side and the core players for the one day side are identified, the better.

The second question will be the key factor. The fitness of the players concerned is so vital. It is natural that through years of play, wear and tear on the body becomes more and more apparent. Should it get in the way of playing on a regular basis, then it affects the performance of the team.
A number of the top players are having fitness problems. The players themselves, the coach, physical advisory staff, must work towards monitoring fitness and ensure that these players are available without missing much cricket.

It is crunch time now. Sri Lanka has slipped to number seven in the international ODI table. Only the West Indies, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe are behind them. It is a desperate situation.

The teams on top of them, Australia, South Africa, India, Pakistan, England and New Zealand, have over the past one year systematically approached selecting and weeding out players for next years World Cup. The Australians though have not yet got their combination sorted out. The other teams are closing the gap between each other and also closing the gap on the Australians. The recently concluded Australia–South Africa series indicated just that. Pakistani’s who went down to India recently displayed their strengths against Sri Lanka.

The way to go now is to select twenty of the fit players who are also performing well and work with them until next March.

Top