In the latest twist in cricket, there is a huge question about Sri Lanka’s tour to the United States and who was responsible for it. Apparently the expenses of the tour were borne by Sri Lanka Cricket.
SLC’s Interim Committee secretary Nishantha Ranatunga, the mentor behind the tour, and his family travelled to the United States where his elder brother and the former SLC CEO Dhammika Ranatunga lives.
The travel back from the United States for the Lankan cricketers had been an arduous one. On their travel back to Zimbabwe via Florida the Lankan cricketers spent more than 50 hours getting messed up in various airports covering three continents. Their flight path covered Florida-Washington, Washington-Doha, Doha-Johannesburg and Johannesburg-Bulawayo.
Dilshan led the team to Zimbabwe |
By contrast, the other officials, like the commentators, who were in Florida for the two T-20 matches against New Zealand left the country one day later and arrived in Zimbabwe almost a day earlier. Their flight path was Florida-Washington, Washington-Johannesburg and Johannesburg-Bulawayo. At the end of the trip some of the Lankan players were thoroughly disoriented.
The question was who is responsible for this ticketing and how did this happen?
In another controversial move, secretary Ranatunga had paid Rs.108,000/- plus another Rs.16,000/- to Prasanna Hennayake to make cutouts of Kumar Sangakkara, Mahela Jayawardena, Sanath Jayasuriya, Muttiah Muralitharan, T.M. Dilshan and Lasitha Malinga. The Studio had produced an audio-visual disc on Sri Lanka’s Cricket History and SLC’s cricket Development Activities for a fund raising project to be used at the official dinner during the Tour of the USA without Interim Committee approval. All this had been done on SLC funds.
Finally the pose is, did the SLC get paid for its excursion to the United States and if so, how much? How much money did the Fund Raising project yield and was the money banked with the SLC accounts as at date?
When asked, the head of Cricket Operations SLC, Ashley de Silva said the US tour had the Interim Committee’s blessings, but it was a low-cost operation, but he was not aware of any other promotional items being compiled with regard to the official dinner held in the United States on SLC’s account.
Explaining the flight route that took 50 hours de Silva said “When it comes to the travel of the national team we always take the convenience of the players into consideration. They travelled to the United States on Qatar Airways.
While coming back we looked around for a shorter flight for their travel to Bulawayo, but, there was no airline which could accommodate 25 business class seats so we had to stick to Qatar Airways, but, cricketers who were travelling to Zimbabwe were up graded to first class in a bid to cut down on their travel fatigue”. |
E-mail
