Even though the BCCI is the most powerful cricket board in world Cricket, it’s president’s always remains low profile. In the history of Indian Cricket, a BCCI President seldom calls for a press conference for any kind of announcement. Head of Australian and English Cricket also follows the same pattern.
However, Thilanga Sumathipala, the glamours President of Sri Lanka Cricket Board (SLC) doesn’t believe in the theory to keep himself low profile. In Sri Cricket, he is everything. And everywhere! He always make his presence felt in almost all the things of Sri Lanka Cricket : be it a normal press conference, ream announcement briefing, trophy distribution in a series or anything else. In all, he uses SLC to brand himself!
On April 20th, however, he crossed all the limits and put SLC constitution in serious threat.
As always, he called for a press conference : this time to announce certain important decisions, according to SLC. During the press conference, he announced the appointment of Sri Lanka team ‘Biscuit’ Manager Asanka Gurusinha to a new post, proudly presented the ‘so called profit sheet’ of Nidahas Trophy.
However, those were only showoff things. His main motive to call the press conference was to announce his own decision to contest next SLC election, to be held on May 19.
However, he destroyed all the ethics and constitution of SLC by doing so. Have a look at it : he announced this at SLC headquarter, as a SLC President, by using SLC platform that he is going to contest next election as well.
“He can’t do this. Sports Ministry must have to endorse, if he is contesting again. Without this, he must have called for a press conference on his own, not using SLC as a platform” A former SLC President told Cricket Age.
In this scenario, this a serious breach of SLC constitution. The date of election and the details of a contestent shouldn’t be announced by the secretary of the Board?
But it was not the case. Reason, at SLC, Under the wings of Sumathipala, all others at SLC are nothing more than just rubber stamps!
