Sri Lanka has been a Test playing nation for 35 years – they played their first Test in 1982 and in that time has produced some outstanding players who have gone onto perform on the world stage and kept the country’s flag flying high. Cricket is the only sport that Sri Lanka can hold their own at international level consistently.
But in recent times the gradual decline of the sport is quite evident and unless this trend is arrested we would become a nation like West Indies and Zimbabwe – just making the numbers instead of being a strong cricket force for which we are recognized internationally.
There is no doubt that cricket is the pride of the nation and the performances of the national players have an adverse effect from the common man to the top most businessman in the country. It is a topic for much discussion at every nook and corner the highs and lows of the team.
Currently the team is going through a low period trying to build a side that could possibly win another World Cup for the country in 2019. But the most frightening aspect is that the quality of cricketers coming through the system has dropped drastically and that is why Sri Lanka are taking a long time to come out of the transition period.
From the present lot it seems only Angelo Mathews is the last of the quality players we will see representing the country for quite some time.
Over the years there has been a gradual decline of players coming through the school and club systems and for this the national bodies for cricket and school cricket are answerable.
School cricket has been diluted to the level that schoolboys play far too many matches for a season some of them against low quality teams and thereby their techniques are not properly honed when they come upto national level. There are plenty of loose balls bowled at batsmen and the bowlers are not made to work hard for their wickets with pitches being prepared to help them. As a result when the cricketer is placed on the international stage he is found to be wanting with his loose batting technique where he would seldom get a loose ball to score and thereby without the patience to wait for it to come along succumb to it. The bowlers too are at a loss on how to get wickets when the pitches are unhelpful. The fault lies with the coaches who want the school to win at any cost so that they retain their jobs and play every trick in the book to make that happen. This selfish approach by some of the coaches has an overall effect on the country’s national pool of cricketers who take time to bridge the gap.
The club system is no better with the administrators who come into power hell bent on laying the platform for their survival at the next AGM so that they can be re-elected for another two-year term. Like the schools system the level of first-class cricket played at club level has also diluted with as many as 24 clubs playing in the Premier tournament today. Some of these clubs have been promoted to keep the administrator’s voter base strong and thereby diluting the level of cricket that is being played. All this has an undesirable effect on the players who come through the system. For the sake of quantity the administration is diluting quality and thereby the cricket at national level suffers.
It was only the other day that former Sri Lanka cricketer Asanka Gurusinha who was the chief guest at the 39th Ceylon Observer-Mobitel Schoolboy Cricketer of the Year contest said his dream is to see an under 19 cricketer representing Sri Lanka in Test cricket before his contract as cricket manager of the national team expires at the end of the 2019 World Cup.
During the schooldays of Gurusinha in the eighties and early nineties any schoolboy cricketer would have walked into the national team because the standard of cricket played at school level was pretty high. A season of matches comprised around 8-10 and against the best schools. Arjuna Ranatunga, Aravinda de Silva and Marvan Atapattu are outstanding examples of schoolboy cricketers who represented the country at Test cricket while still at school.
Can any of the present day generation of schoolboy cricketers emulate their feat?
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