By Madushka Balasuriya

Sri Lanka Cricket has called for time and patience to be given to their young national side, following the team’s capitulation at the hands of South Africa in their recent Test series. 

The team lost all three Test matches comprehensively, and calling a media briefing yesterday, SLC revealed that following the whitewash both Captain Angelo Mathews and Vice Captain Dinesh Chandimal had taken part in a conference call with the board, coaches and selectors to discuss what went wrong on the tour. 

Chairman of Selectors Sanath Jayasuriya explained that the conversation had been productive, but that while there were no excuses, results such as these must be expected occasionally from such a young outfit.

“This is a very young team, so we need a little bit more time and we need to be a bit more patient. Down the line we need to expect these sorts of setbacks especially in places such as South Africa and England,” he said.

“Nevertheless, I’m not here to give excuses, we know that there are things that we need to improve as a team, as a batting unit, and even the bowling unit. We need to improve our performances on away tours.”

One of the main reasons for the failure in South Africa was the performance of the batsmen, with only three half-centuries being scored across the six innings. Jayasuriya admitted that this was a very disappointing statistic, and cited the need for batsmen who got themselves in to kick on.

“It is disappointing. We had the opportunities. We got the starts but didn’t convert them into big hundreds. We saw how the South Africans were struggling with the conditions as well, but when a player such as Amla got a chance he took it. I think that is what we needed from our players, and I think this is something the players themselves realise,” noted Jayasuriya, adding that the players and batsman in particular were having discussions among themselves on how to rectify the situation.

“With experience and more international games under their belts I think the team will settle down and start to perform better. We’re not expecting all of them to get runs. With seven batsman we only need two to get big scores.” 

Looking to the future 

Questions were also raised at the media briefing about whether the quality of domestic cricket was good enough to prepare batsmen for the high quality fast bowling faced in international matches. SLC recently hired High Performance Manager Simon Willis to oversee the domestic coaching and scouting structures, while a new Brain Centre for player data analysis is under construction. 

SLC President Thilanga Sumathipala believes that with these investments the domestic structure is in good hands to continue producing top class players, but urged patience as immediate results would not be possible.

“Through the domestic tournaments we filter the top players out. Once they’re identified the high performance team takes over to educate and improve their techniques. Then we can explain to them how to maximise their strengths and minimise their weaknesses. This is a high end technical aspect that we’re dealing with at the moment, which you can’t deal with purely through a domestic tournament.

“But we’re not going to run out of players. There are top players coming out of the system, there are outstanding batsmen, our pacers are doing very well, but for them to all come through the system to the national team it will take a good 6-8 months. And then once those level of players come together, they then need to gain the exposure and experience.”

India to play in Independence Cup

India have been pencilled in to take part in the Independence Cup next year in Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Cricket announced yesterday.

"Sri Lanka will be celebrating her 70th year since her independence from British rule on 4 February, 2018. To mark the auspicious day, Sri Lanka Cricket will be organising an Independence Cup with the participation of three or four countries including India,” revealed SLC President Thilanga Sumathipala at a media briefing.

Sumathipala noted that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had discussed the matter with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Meanwhile, on Sri Lanka’s cancelled return tour to South Africa, which was due to take place later this year, SLC CEO Ashley De Silva assured that the decision had nothing to do with Sri Lanka’s poor showing in their present tour. 

“As we all know there are back-to-back tours scheduled to South Africa as per the FTP (Future Tours Program) but the second of the tours is now in doubt, but not because of this series,” he explained.

“We have been having discussions prior to the tour, but it has not been finalised whether we are going ahead with the tour or not. Since we also had some plans we actually made an appeal to them to see if we could look at some alternative arrangements.”