Roughly one and half month before the world cup, Sri Lanka Cricket is confused, direction less and divided on opinions. The selection committee wants one player to be captain of the team, the high profile Coach wants another one to be considered. One former skipper is ready to accept captaincy again but wants an apology from the head Coach. Another player has suddenly become a candidate for the captaincy, but he has not played ODI cricket since last four years!
In this sort of confusing scenario, the selectors are eagerly waiting for head coach Chandika Hathurasingha to arrive in Sri Lanka and guide them!
Chandika Hathurusingha, as always, is on leave and in Australia. He is expected to arrive before April 18 and then only selectors will be able to finalize the world cup squad.
It, however, looks odd! Few days ago, chief selector Asantha De Mel had made it clear that they would select world cup squad based on the performances in recently concluded domestic provincial tournament. For Asantha’s bad luck, that tournament turned out an epic disaster for all the probables of World Cup, except for Dimuth Karunaratne and Angelo Mathews. Both the designated openers Niroshan Dickwella and Danushka Gunathilika failed miserably, Dinesh Chandimal and Upul Tharanga proved once again that wasting more time on them is useless. Only condolence for Asantha De Mel from the tournament is that he managed to play his blue eyed baby Ramith Rambukwella in a match and his another favorite Lahiru Thirimane played some good innings, so he can again drag this international failure into world cup squad!
Another fact is that, Hathurusingha didn’t watch any of the match of the tournament as he was in Australia. To be precise, no national Coach was in Sri Lanka during the tournament.
So, what is the logic to consider Hathurusingha’s input and advice, when he was not even there for a tournament, which was played to select the world cup squad?The truth is that right from the beginning of his stint with Sri Lanka national team, Hathurusingha opted for holiday’s, whenever SLC organized a domestic tournament to select squads for the international tours and tournaments. Ideally, by learning from the past, SLC and selectors should have left Hathurusingha from their scheme of things and just allow him to focus on drawing the million dollars salary for few more months!
