Sri Lankans put on a gutsy show for free

Wall Street Journal.com: Not many employers could get away with not paying their most important employees for eight months. But that’s what cricket’s governing body in Sri Lanka has just done. Amazingly, those employees, the international-team players, have carried on working.

Sri Lanka Cricket has managed to land itself $23 million in debt, with much of the money going on an ambitious program that included building new grounds at Hambantota and Pallekele and redeveloping the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, before co-hosting the recent World Cup with India. The current situation came to a head because an expected $4.3 million in World Cup-related proceeds hasn’t arrived from the International Cricket Council, and they won’t until the game’s global body has completed an internal audit. The situation is so dire that the board has asked the national government for money and various branches of the nation’s military have had to step in take over the three stadiums.

Amid this financial turmoil, the players have been left unpaid to the tune of 347 million Sri Lankan rupees, or about $3 million. The board recently promised to pay half of this soon, but that really isn’t good enough. It’s shocking enough that the board has got itself into this state. But of all the things it chooses to sacrifice, one of them is the salaries of the players. The players have played on, despite the lucrative alternative offers that many of them would have been able to take up. Some of the same players were shot or shot at in the course of representing their country in the 2009 Lahore terrorist attacks. It’s a pretty shoddy way to treat them.

Their counterparts in South Africa, their hosts in a test series that starts on Thursday [Eds: Dec 15], have even expressed their support publicly. “In this age of professionalism in cricket this kind of thing should not be happening,” said South Africa one-day international captain AB de Villiers in a statement from the South African Cricketers’ Association.

Since the World Cup, the Sri Lankan team’s fortunes have taken a serious slide. They haven’t won a single test and have lost test and ODI series to England, Australia and Pakistan. The main reason for this has been the retirement of two of their three greatest bowlers, Muttiah Muralitharan and Chaminda Vaas, and from test cricket of the third, Lasith Malinga. But not getting paid can’t exactly help with the remaining players’ motivation, especially as the retirements have ushered in a transitional period in which the team is often filled with players who are young, inexperienced and, crucially, not yet particularly wealthy.

It certainly adds extra piquancy to the forthright remarks made four months ago by current Sri Lankan batsman and the nation’s former captain, Kumar Sangakkara, who lambasted the country’s cricket board in the MCC Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture. “Accusations of vote buying and rigging, player interference due to lobbying from each side and even violence at the AGMs, including the brandishing of weapons and ugly fist fights, have characterized cricket board elections for as long as I can remember,” he said in the speech.

Sangakkara said that following the team’s game-changing 1996 World Cup victory, “accountability and transparency in administration and credibility of conduct were lost in a mad power struggle that would leave Sri Lankan cricket with no consistent and clear administration. Presidents and elected executive committees would come and go; government-picked interim committees would be appointed and dissolved.”

The board, he added, changed “from a volunteer-led organization run by well-meaning men of integrity into a multimillion-dollar organization that has been in turmoil ever since.”

At its annual conference in Hong Kong in June, the ICC sensibly voted to ban political interference on cricket boards, so hopefully some of the calamities Sangakkara describes will not be allowed to happen in the future. But depoliticizing cricket, in Sri Lanka and in a number of other countries, is going to take a bit more than rulings from above.

ICC Chief Executive Haroon Lorgat has been impressively forthright on the subject of his own organization’s governance recently, accusing member boards of weakness and calling for independent ICC directors so that “there’s at least a balance of debate or a voice spoken without self-interest.”

Voting members not representing a national interest would make the ICC work more in cricket’s interest. Independent figures without a political or financial axe to grind also need to be put in charge of national boards, because when the board of the fifth-best team in the world can’t pay its players, amateur hour has gone on long enough.