I agree with Robert’s
I agree with Robert’s comments to a certain degree that are chances may be ‘dim and slim’. The fault lies purely with the selectors and all those at SLC (who are in charge of cricket in Srilanka).

I would have to disagree with Robert with respect to the point being made in this column about SL cricketers not having huge strike rates. Does it matter? One would think that in a format such as this huge strke rates make the difference between winning and loosing. But this is where I beg to differ.

If you look at all the ICC tournaments we(SL team) has taken part in, you would see that we have arguably been the most successful team at this format in almost all the ICC tournaments. Yet, we never had powerful hitters, with very high strike rates. The only time we had a powerful batsmen who could clobber the ball around the park was when Thisara Perera joined the side. Of course, we had Sanath during the ICC world cup held in the UK, but he was almost past his prime then.

Furthermore, if you look at all the runs we scored in all the ICC tournaments, you would realise that we scored on average something around 135/140 of course on an exceptional day and these were very rare we would score 190 and sometimes we use to score around 150/160 when Sanga/Mahela battered well, but these scores were far and few between and in reality a score of 135/140 we would defend.

What has gone horribly wrong for us is that we have lacked imagination and patitence to build a strong side after the great Mahela/Sanga retired. We had two years for the selectors to only just think of the next tour, they only wanted short term goals, to just win the tour or draw so that the our T20 ranking is maintained. No one notices the problem because we were loosing every single tour with respect to the one day and the test matches. The heavy decline should NOT come as a surprise because we havent groomed a side, we havent given the right people the chance to perform, specially for a longer period and we have not built a strong bench. So lack of vision and planning has left us with a massive whole to fill.

The players I’m referring to are the Kithruwan’s (Vithanage), Dilshan Munaweera, Akila Dhananjaya, Lakshan Sandakan, the list is endless. These are some of the guys but I could go on and on. We have come to a tournament without the bowlers who have the X factor, even someone like Tharindu Kausal or even Mendis would have been a better fit than the bowlers brought for this tournament. What is Kulasekara’s role? What is Sachitra Senanayake’s role? These are questions to the administrators and the selectors but frankly they have all let us down!!!