Clean cricket

PROVING that all that shines is not gold, Captain Mahela Jayawardene put a damper on the Sri Lanka Premier League (SLPL) launch on Monday night by suggesting national players like to see the contract impasse resolved sooner than later.

The media was also full of questions with regard to the financials of the SLPL, though the first ball of the tournament is yet to be bowled. The seven provincial teams featuring SLPL along with over 100 local players and around 50 foreign stars will be played over 21 days from 11 August onwards.

By virtue of franchises sold for $ 30 million, SLPL will result in an inflow of foreign exchange as well as widespread interest from cricket fans. However the media’s barrage of questions over finances, some of which were given explicit answers, perhaps originates from the financial fallout of co-hosting the World Cup early last year. Many months after, there is no clear indication on how Sri Lanka Cricket will recoup its massive losses of Rs. 7 billion.

With the Government tapped out with its own problems, it remains to be seen how the organisation will find its financial feet again and in a broader sense, install sound financial management and good governance into this most corrupt of institutions.

On the one hand, there is the conventional wisdom that Sri Lanka Cricket is corrupt, bankrupt and a bastion of bureaucratic mismanagement; quite symptomatic, in fact, of the general malaise that ails typical Sri Lankan State institutions. On the other, there is a resurgent sentiment which holds that the spirit of cricket as embodied by the National Team is still a bulwark against the rising tide of the institutional failure and moral decrepitude that characterises Sri Lankan politics.

That hype and hoopla apart, the reality is that Sri Lanka Cricket continues to be conflated with amoral misdemeanours of the monetary sort in the minds of the general public – an impression that is readily confirmed even by State watchdog - the Committee On Public Enterprises (COPE).

Whilst the current SLC administration may have inherited a loss-making legacy, how it manages the finances will be under constant scrutiny. SLPL indeed will boost its coffers, but the larger goal is to ensure funds are spent in a transparent manner to build rural talent and cricket infrastructure.

Many optimists in the cricket-loving nation continue to put their faith in its cricketers, especially the likes of Kumar Sangakkara – another ex-skipper and the author of an outspoken diatribe against Sri Lanka Cricket’s corrupt ways, in his internationally well-received Colin Cowdrey Spirit of Cricket Lecture (2011).

Sangakkara in a recent interview also pointed out that talent alone would not keep the team to winning ways unless the entire system was cleaned out, so that new players could be blooded fairly and running of the game was not killed off by cancerous politics – by both players and officials.

The fans are also hoping that the protractedly underpaid cricketers will provide a counterpoint to the corruption juggernaut that is Sri Lankan politics, for otherwise the greatest passion of the nation will die out.

In that context, whilst SLC and SLPL organisers drum up masses to savour the carnival of cricket come mid-August, it is also critical that SLC sincerely and effectively incorporates and implements anti-corruption codes for domestic cricket in line with the ICC’s international code. This will give greater credence for the new administration if it wants to walk the talk in terms of fighting the ills of system.