With the 2019 Cricket World Cup fast approaching Sri Lanka are nowhere near towards producing the consistent form that is required to be among the elite lot that can be spoken of as among the favourites to win the coveted silverware for which all cricketing nation strives for every four years.
The pressure when a team is usually on a downward trend is on the head coach and Chandika Hathurusingha has been under the microscope ever since he assumed duties on December 29, 2017. He came to Sri Lanka with a big reputation having lifted Bangladesh cricket in the three years he was their head coach to a point which they had never reached in their history – they reached a World Cup quarterfinal knocking out England at Adelaide in 2015.
Hathurusingha was even spoken of as the messiah who had come to resurrect Sri Lanka cricket from the depths it had fallen to. Now 13 months down the line Sri Lanka has yet to lift itself from its ranking at eight and the way the one-day team is performing they have not shown any signs of doing so - not in the near future.
Where Sri Lanka Cricket erred in recruiting Hathurusingha is that in their desperation to get a head coach to succeed Graham Ford, they gave him wide ranging powers where he controlled virtually everything. He became the supremo of Sri Lanka cricket and that put him above everyone else. With Sri Lanka Cricket elections getting postponed and there being no properly elected or appointed body in place made Hathurusingha’s task to call the shots all that easy.
No one would have questioned his credibility if he had managed to turn things around for the Sri Lanka team like he had done for Bangladesh. Failure to do so after more than a year in the saddle has put him in the hot seat to deliver and the exorbitant salary that he is being paid by Sri Lanka Cricket which is more than what a top government servant earns has become the talking point in cricket circles whether he is worth that much.
Under Hathurusingha Sri Lanka has hardly improved on their ODI record losing 13 out of 20 matches played (6 wins) so far and remained stagnant in eighth position in the rankings, they’ve dropped to seventh (from sixth) in the Test rankings with 5 losses and four wins from 12 matches (3 drawn) and the worst was dropping from eighth to ninth in the T20I rankings (4 wins, 5 losses) which deprived them of direct qualification for the Super 12 at the 2020 World T20 in Australia. Sri Lanka will have to contest the initial group stage with four other sides in a global qualifier to be played in October or November this year with four of the six teams qualifying for the Super 12s.
To be fair by Hathurusingha one also has to examine the depth of experienced players he has at his disposal for the World Cup. One of the key factors in Sri Lanka’s continued ODI defeats is the failure of the top and middle order batting to deliver and post totals in excess of 300 constantly. One has only to examine the top order batting of other countries to know exactly where Sri Lanka stands today by way of experience.
Take India for instance the experience of Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan, Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni amounts to 865 ODI matches, over 33,000 runs and a whopping 85 centuries. No other country comes anywhere close to them, the nearest by way of the number of centuries scored is South Africa with 55 from 506 ODIs (Amla, De Kock, Miller and Du Plessis), England 50 from 766 ODIs (Roy, Hales, Bairstow, Root, Morgan, Buttler and Stokes), New Zealand 50 from 704 ODIs (Guptill, Latham, Williamson, Taylor and Nicholls), and Australia 42 from 471 ODIs (Warner, Finch, Smith, S Marsh, M Marsh and Head). The one-year bans on David Warner and Steve Smith for their part in the ball-tampering case in South Africa will expire on March 29, 2019 which would make them available for World Cup selection.
Bangladesh who has players who have played the most number of ODIs 887 has only 34 hundreds compared to Pakistan who have 37 from 677 ODIs. Sri Lanka and West Indies have the least number of hundreds. From 813 ODIs Sri Lanka has scored only 29 hundreds (Dickwella, Tharanga, Gunathilaka, Kusal Perera, Kusal Mendis, Chandimal, Mathews and Samarawickrama and West Indies 23 hundreds from 489 ODIs.
Therein lies Sri Lanka’s problem with their batting the lack of experience is certainly taking a heavy toll. It is the same with the bowling as well where Sri Lanka lack wicket-taking bowlers in the middle overs to stall the opponents from making a big bash in the last ten overs. Occasional lapses on the field can be overcome if the batting and bowling are on par with other countries. Even host England and India the two countries strongly tipped to win the World Cup are not infallible in their catching but they ensure they make the least mistakes on the field than their opponents. That’s why they are one-two in the current ODI rankings.
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