{"id":41840,"date":"2015-02-27T07:27:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T14:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=41840"},"modified":"2015-02-27T07:27:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T14:27:00","slug":"sri-lanka-won-and-selectors-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/02\/27\/sri-lanka-won-and-selectors-lost\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka WON and Selectors LOST"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ananda De Costa<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Sri Lankans have a bad habit of hanging on to persons than to the obvious truth. We won 1996 world cup with very experienced players and we were out in the\u00a0 first round at the next world cup hanging on to most of them.<\/p>\n

Sri Lanka won yesterday beating Bangladesh,\u00a0 making sure a place in the quarterfinals but did our local coaches and selectors\u00a0 learn any lesson from it ?<\/p>\n

Are we prepared to take risks which is essential to bring victories in a big tournament?<\/p>\n

There is no doubt we have the most experienced and skilled batsmen of all the teams, if not in the history of all the ICC world cup tournaments.\u00a0 Mahela, Sangakkara, Dilshan , Tharanga<\/strong> and Mathews<\/strong> are the best set of frontline batsmen in the world, yet the foolish selectors do not give them the deserved responsibility and authority to attack any bowling side in the world. Yesterday match results proved we need not play eight<\/strong> batters doubting skills of all of them. 50% probability assumption approach is actually conservative enough to avoid defeat due to insufficient runs on the board. When they nominate too many batsmen, obviously there is insufficient concentration generated in the minds of batsmen, encouraging lethargy.\u00a0 This attitude is an insult to Mahela ,Sangakkara and Dilshan.<\/p>\n

In the recent past we had two good batting all rounders in Tisara Perera and Ashan Priyanjan. Ashan was not selected but there are few players in the squad who are very unlikely to perform well under Australia and New Zealand conditions. This cannot be corrected now but selectors must select the best team to suit each match and venue.<\/p>\n

The selected team for yesterday\u2019s match was completely out of balance, as if we have NOT trusted our batsmen. It was a complete failure for the selectors, despite a good win<\/strong>. Obviously there were many good batsmen who did only fielding and were thus useless as batsmen. Thisara Perera was overused as frontline bowler, giving him a back injury. Selectors are totally to be blamed for this.<\/p>\n

Clearly we lack good fast bowlers and it cannot be rectified by fielding spinners in a land where Muralidharan got hammered 100 runs in 10 overs. Indians are aware of this , but our selectors are busy praying \u00a0than thinking. \u00a0If one looks at Australia, New Zealand, India and South African squads , they all have at least four specialist fast bowlers.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Australia<\/strong>– Pat Cummings, Mitchell Johnson, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood<\/p>\n

New Zealand<\/strong> \u2013 Tim Southee , Trent Boult, Adam Milne and Kyle Mills<\/p>\n

India<\/strong> \u2013 Umesh Yadav, Mohit Sharma, Ishant Sharma and Mohomad Shami ( I ignored Bhuvaneshwar as he is a Kulasekara type bowler but much better)<\/p>\n

South Africa <\/strong>\u2013 Morne Morkel, Dale Styne, Wayne Parnell and Aron Phangiso<\/p>\n

Sri Lanka<\/strong> \u2013( Half fit)\u00a0 Malinga, , Suranga Lakmal,\u00a0 ( I don\u2019t list Kulasekara here as he is an all-rounder who can only bowl\u00a0 more than 3-5\u00a0 opening spell\u00a0 without getting hammered and Dushmantha Chameera who is the only Sri Lankan bowler who is capable of hitting 150 kPh on a\u00a0 MCC pitch but forced to carry drinks)<\/p>\n

Yesterday , we went with two specialist fast\u00a0 bowlers and the shortcoming was clearly evident.\u00a0 We will be getting hammered in the England match if we do the same and if we could not put 300+ score on the board.<\/p>\n

Writer Mohammad Islam\u00a0\u00a0 of ESPN Cricinfo mentioned this in his report Sri Lanka’s decision to play with one less bowler in the absence of Jeevan Mendis ultimately wasn’t tested enough as they had plenty of runs to bank on. Malinga took three wickets and Lakmal bowled with a lot of energy, but two dropped catches meant he didn’t end with better bowling figures. Sri Lanka, nonetheless, have plenty to take away from this resounding result.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In fact, this win may even\u00a0 encourage our unscrupulous selectors.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When will our selectors learn? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Are they waiting for the inevitable disaster?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ananda De Costa Sri Lankans have a bad habit of hanging on to persons than to the obvious truth. We won 1996 world cup with very experienced players and we were out in the\u00a0 first round at the next world cup hanging on to most of them. Sri Lanka won yesterday beating Bangladesh,\u00a0 making sure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}