Dias
“In an explosive statement, World Cup winning Captain Minister Arjuna Ranatunga has claimed that Minister of Sports Harin Fernando should write to the International Cricket Council and call for an independent inquiry into the alleged mistreatment of Sri Lankan players and pitches given to the team during the ongoing 2019 Cricket World Cup.”
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We do respect the former 1996 WC wining Captain Arjuna Ranatunga as a great cricketer, but is this comments based on seeing the wickets by himself or just go by the crying of SL officials in England.
Let’s face the bitter truth we have a fragile batting line up, player’s motivation is not there, they don’t look confident out in the middle, no signs of clicking together or knows their responsibilities, so crying about pitches not ethical dear .
Anura,
Arjuna’s complain is correct but it has come so late after all the damage has been done with respect to players confidence and many failed match results. After watching every SL match played so far, he and all our cricket experts in SLC (Asantha and Hathu etc) should have made this complain two weeks back after we played our first match on 06-01-19 at Cardiff.
I commented on the same issue (see the following comments posted by me & Lankan Roy 14 days back) as a cricket fan after seeing the pitches on TV.
But our Head coach, Manager and all players seeing the first green pitch on 6-1-19 did not have any clue how it will effect our batsmen’s performances.
I call all these so called “SLC Experts” as idiotic and incompetent lot who are ruining the standard of SL cricket.
We should have logged an official complain on the 2nd of June 2019 (3 days after the WC started & upon completion of the SL match in Cardiff) That could have been the correct time and ICC would have rectified the issue immediately. If they realized their mistake they would have trimmed thick grass covers left in some grounds / pitches thereafter (which were assigned for SL). That that would have definitely helped to accelerate the moisture evaporation and we would have got dry pitches from our second match on wards.
I still maintain my earlier stand that ICC are playing a “Double Game” in this WC. By providing some inconsistency on the pitch surfaces they have ensured that some countries including England & India who got accurate quicks (bowling at 142+) and well performing top order batters will always perform well (scoring 350+ run totals) and put lot of pressure on the other teams who are weaker in bowling as well as batting.
THE FOLLOWING COMMENTS WERE EXTRACTED FROM A BLOG POSTED ABOUT 14 DAYS BACK
(1) Susantha Jayawardena 14 days ago
None of these cricketers and coach seem to disclose the root cause to the problem. I personally think that our batsmen are not properly coached and you can see that very clearly from the poor technique they are adopting in these conditions. I have not seen such poor technique from batters from the other teams. Probably Cardiff pitch is the greenest pitch we have seen so far in this WC and we had to bat first on both occasions facing quicks bowling at 142+ kph speeds. We need our expert cricketers like Sanga to touch this point. Why the WC organizers made such a poor decision to provide such a pitch showing a huge difference on surface inconsistency.
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(2) Susantha Jayawardena 14 days ago
One more point. I heard during the commentary that the Cardiff pitch curators decided not to trim the thick grass as they were afraid of breaking up the surface if that was done. Don’t know what was the reason behind that as most of the grounds have more than one playing strips and when 3/4 matches are going to be played in one venue, they can even use the 2nd or third strip and avoid a disintegrated surface for the 3rd or 4th match.
Even for today’s match thick grass has not been trimmed. So can we call this as a case of “Doctoring the Pitch” by the organizers in comparison with all other pitches played upto now where batting first was OK (except the 2nd match where PK lost badly but that was due to them playing so poorly against a barrage of short pitched bowling and not due to seaming conditions. On the same pitch Pakistan batted so beautifully yesterday and won the match also.
In my opinion I think on both occasions our batsmen were undone or treated badly due to the very unfavorable pitch conditions for batting.
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(3) Lankan Roy 13 days ago
I don’t like to come up with a conspiracy theory but it sounds like they purposely left the grass so team like us will struggle. As it was mentioned by our coach. I wonder if they sarw to do that when our good neighbours are playing. Even when our neighbors last toured Australia they were playing on drop in pitches. Rest of the world will come to know if they had to play on as geen top. I won’t be surprised even the very vocal prime minister declaring war on ICC opps it should be BCCi right!!
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(4) Susantha Jayawardena 12 days ago
Can we Call this issue as a “Double Game of ICC” ? I may be wrong but ICC / pitch curators should prepare the pitch surfaces to give the similar consistency to all teams taking part not forgetting that there are many other factors effecting the game plans, like overcast conditions, low temperature / low evaporation of surface moisture, lack of sunlight etc which are all out of control by the curators. So when there are many uncontrollable factors in the UK why we leave a thick grass cover and create more and more problems to the batsmen ?
That is why I call it a “Double Game of ICC Pitch Curators”
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Dear Susantha,
Yeah you points are valid but take Dimuth, Kusal’s batting on all three matches SL played they batted beautifully so how come they did well.if rest of the batting continued we could have had good totals, So how come those two facing the new ball , survived continued and other’s failed miserably Edirimanna, Mendis, Matthews , Danajaya, Thisara on three occasions, can’t you see my point, if pitches were doctered our openers should have failed on all three innings. I am not in argument or contesting your comments but it’s the bitter truth Susantha.
Don’t agree with Arjuna! We cannot complain about pitches overseas and what’s more, it’s not unusual for green tracks in England. Further, it’s not like we batted on the green pitch and the opposition batted on a different wicket. You compete at international level means you complete on the wicket provided. Finally, are we seriously thinking that the ICC or anyone else is doctoring pitches in the fear of losing to SL!!! Are we seriously thinking that other teams are nervous of our spin attack that cannot win at home even against Zim, on spinning wickets!.