Dinesh Chandimal has got a raw deal and he is one of the players who have been ridiculously mismanaged by the entire cricketing establishment in Sri Lanka and that goes to the selectors and coaches as well.
The whole of Sri Lanka will like to tell Dinesh Chandimal: “Don’t worry son these people don’t know what you can do. They looked at you as a captain not because they liked you or saw anything different in you, but because they wanted you as a political pawn to replace others as the captain and with this they ruined you and destroyed your wonderful batting that we saw in that World Cup match against Australia in 2015”
“Don’t worry Chandimal we know how you must be feeling but you have done nothing wrong and I will bet that you will come back soon and please say No if they try to give you the captaincy once again. You are such a nice well brought up boy. The next time look at yourself as a specialist batsman only and let those big wigs sought out their captaincy matters. You are the best talent that Sri Lanka has discovered in 20 years since Marvan Atapattu and they ruined you by giving you the captaincy.
“Sri Lanka is not a team to captain. There is so much of politics and interference like everything else in the country. Let them do their fighting and stay away from the crossfire. I am begging you don’t ever accept this captaincy again and we hope that from now on you will be the role model batsman that good old Sri Lanka never had both on and off the field”.
The school cricket scene is no different from the chaos in the Sri Lanka team in a different way and it was not surprising that former Sri Lanka batsman Roshan Mahanama regretted that there is no quality in school cricket today.
In the past scoring 600 in the school season was an achievement and very rarely did four batsmen go past the 1000-run mark. Today every school has a batsman or two who have scored over 1000 runs.
If schoolboys are playing cricket for fun to enjoy themselves, then it is all well and good as these kids go to school to study and not play. But if those running school cricket see schools as the nursery for producing players to the Sri Lanka team, then something must be done.
Paul Jacob
Piliyandala