Is our sports following the financial turmoil of our battered nation?
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Cricket is a mode of solace for most Sri Lankans
We have been regaled over the last year or two about how we went feet up in our national fiscal management. The Supreme Court no less, has held a coterie of persons accountable for this dismal state of affairs that have put a whole nation into despair amid insurmountable hardship.
While we bear that miserable admonition of our lives, it may be timely to consider what ails our sports, not that most sectors such as health and environment are any better. To cap it all, comes the long precipitated news that the Minister of Sports (MoS) has been shown the door by the President, given the antagonistic tussle that has been played out over the last few months.
Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) has been taken to the cleaners by all and sundry. To be fair, the public has been privy to a grotesque parody of brinkmanship played in the media with disclosures that have been mind-blowing, dragging no less a personage than BCCI’s Jay Shah into the cauldron. Nothing of what has been said has made any official of SLC budge an inch, except one honourable member who thought it fit and proper to vacate the enigmatic role of Secretary, as demanded by the MoS.
That ethical move did not cause any flutter, except the tactical ploy aimed at causing ICC to suspend SLC, something the President had anticipated and wished to prevent. Arguments in select media, that ICC is anything but impartial, citing its approach to counties like Afghanistan, is worth a note, as it also applies to other sports, where a sovereign nation is held to ransom by international sports bodies.
Given the hullabaloo raging in cricket with the SLC suspension threatening to overshadow the World Cup result which sports critics said even upended the Modi expectation in Ahmedabad, other sports in Sri Lanka did not get a look in the media, which maintained a serial commentary of what a circus cricket had descended to, with accusations of doctored pitches and favored umpires manipulated by the host nation. Though a small island nation, Sri Lanka has an envious tradition of sport prowess and while a cacophony of noise in Indian cities and other popular capitals subdue the toil and sweat of many athletes across the country, the determination to excel and reach for the stars is not quelled or subjugated by phony politics.
Rugby has all but recovered with the Asian body welcoming Sri Lanka Rugby (SLR) into its folds. Its local tournament is about to kickoff and the glamour associated with the sport is very much centre stage. Football is streaming ahead on its unity platform with its three-headed leadership making the customary accompaniment to witness the World Cup preliminary rounds in the middle-east. Though Sri Lanka lost, its overall performance augmented by a strong technical component augers well. The promise of an expatriate administrator in the future is bound to give football a fillip it earnestly needs and one is prone to let the bygone allegations of corruption subside and allow the fresh administration to focus on what could become a bright future.
Our track and field athletes continue to astonish us with new discoveries of talent from the provinces making their debut on the world stage. Of course the tom-tom beating by the political machinery will seek to exploit all such commendable performances and join the cavalcade of reputation seekers. That’s only natural. The man in the street identifies with these unheralded champions because they more than the mandarins, know what it means to run or jump on an empty stomach. Even as we write, a new minister of sports has been announced, not a man new to the job. With tourism, lands and sports to boot, the youthful minister is not short of portfolios. A politician who is known to revel in challenges, he must not lose sight of the impoverished majority of sportsmen and sportswomen who emerge from unknown hotspots to put Sri Lanka on the world map.
Its time our sports leaders let the cricketing gigolos fester in the murky blowholes they have dug for themselves or go play in lucre laden tourneys where money grows on trees as it were and produce instead, a more equitable palette of sport that all can enjoy and prosper from. Tourism fits in well to such a shift and while no one will want cricket to be relegated to the doldrums, the opportunities that sports like athletics and football can attract are aplenty, if only our administrators can see the wood from the trees. The country is crying for a system change and sport can show the way from the labyrinth it is in, because it is one strata of society where performance is plain to see and meritocracy triumphs in the end.