Building bridges

On Wednesday morning the young Sri Lanka captain Mahela Jayawardena brought back memories of Ehelepola Disawe’s son Madduma Bandara who held out his own neck and life for the sake of his family and thus became immortal. Here too the youthful Lankan captain held out his neck to a media gallery on whatever the explanations that he could come forth with after the thoughtless crash out at the Champions Trophy. But, how convincing he was with his explanations is worth analysing.

The morning sessions started with the SLC head table wanting answers to some of the accusations that were levelled by the local media on some issues that they thought were very pertinent. At the same time it must be made very clear that the job of the media is to point out such thorny issues before they become festering wounds and thus warrants an amputation of the whole limb in question. Good, Mahela came out and took the blame upon himself on the defeat and at one point admitted that one of the catches that he missed off Dilhara Fernando’s bowling was a pointer of the Lankan defeat of that particular match. However there is more to it. What he failed to guide us through was the path that the Sri Lanka cricket would take on its way to the World Cup via New Zealand in the next few months. It was not very clear if Sri Lanka are to go in with the same mistakes that they are committing at present or if they were ready to learn from their mistakes.

The most startling factor of the morning was the admittance of the stand in Lankan skipper that his consultation about the team compositions with the other senior members of the team were limited to light banter while at practices and not at serious decision making quorums. With two former captains in Sanath Jayasuriya and Marvan Atapattu along with good cricketing heads like Muralitharan, Vaas and Sangakkara, Mahela has a good senate to consult, but, taking crucial decisions on his own along with only coach Moody could be termed rather naïve

Then in the same vein he mentioned about the challenges of the modern day limited overs cricket and the twenty overs of power-play that comes along with it. At that point Mahela Jayawardena stressed the importance of going in for a game with four seam bowlers. To add more weight to that fact he added that he needed four seamers so that if one seamer fails on a given day that he would have the luxury of under-bowling one of them. Thus we are coming once again to the question of what happened at the Champions Trophy tournament. At the same time he made us understand that he has no confidence in at least one of the four seam bowlers in his team who is to play in the match. With this what we understand is that he goes in for a game with ten players and one passenger hoping and praying that the passenger would turn out to be a match winner on that given day.

Then the other thorny issue of not playing along with Lanka’s perennial strength of spin bowling. In last week’s musing we discussed about the non-inclusion of leg spinner Malinga Bandara in any of the games. The Lankan skipper explained that Lanka already had two spinners in Muralitharan and Jayasuriya and he did not want to risk it with another spinner owing to the prevailing dew factor in India. Then he went to the extent of explaining that a wrist spinner would find it more difficult to grip the ball in dew conditions rather than a finger spinner. We asked then why did we have to tag him along at all? His just answer was that the Lankan team needed two specialist spinners in the squad. Then by chance had Murali broken down mid-tournament the available wrist spinner would have to play and invariably he would have made a hash of it as he would find it hard to grip the ball. At the same time we also asked why the wrist spinner was not included in a match that we were very confident of winning during the qualifying rounds while playing against the weakest teams in the world cricket arena and may be for that given match Jayasuriya could have played as a specialist batsman only and we would have another three seamers to bowl another thirty overs if needed. But, still he said that he did not want to take the risk at that juncture. This still goes to prove that the captain has no faith in a wrist spinner at all and he does not want to risk playing one of them and lose a match. But, I still wonder how in Australia Bandara bowled well to capture 18 wickets. In England he filled the slot when the need arose and in Bangladesh he did the same.

To be doubly sure about arguing with a person like a captain of a Test playing nation Musings just inquired from a former Sri Lanka leg spinner who answered my questions, but wanted to stay out of the controversy himself. He said that if a bowler is playing at that level he may be a finger spinner or a wrist spinner, but at that level one must be able to bowl at any given condition. He said a wrist spinner may not turn the ball like a finger spinner, but he would be able to bowl top spinners and wicket to wicket in a manner that he would be able to contain a batsman of any class. At the same time if Sri Lanka had the combinations of Muralitharan and Bandara bowling in tandem with Jayasuriya as a stock bowler, we would have done better in this tournament.