Sri Lanka Cricket: A rudderless ship heading nowhere

By Sa’adi Thawfeeq

Judging by the performance of the cricket team in Australia, it is becoming evidently clear that Sri Lanka cricket is a rudderless ship heading nowhere. 

A good example is how Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) and the Cricket Development and Technical Advisory Committee (Tech) with all the super star pundits appointed by the Sports Minister are struggling to introduce a cohesive plan towards rescuing cricket from the depths it finds itself over the last six years. A classic example of the skewered line of thinking of the current SLC think-tank is clearly demonstrated with the recommendations allegedly being made by the Tech committee.

A head coach should have the stature to command respect of his charges and the names that have come up for the post in the past few weeks indicate that the Tech committee and SLC are nowhere close to identifying a suitable candidate with the required credentials for the post.

A Sri Lankan coach will never be able to manage the politics involved with cricket in Sri Lanka. We have tried several local coaches in the past and failed miserably. We are beating the same old tried and tested drum which has repeatedly proven a failure in trying to bring in local coaches.

You need an independent free-thinking coach who will do his job without any favours or agendas promoted by anybody. A very strong-willed independent coach who has the ability to establish a working relationship with the selectors and the rest of his support staff and form a team to be cohesive in everything they do. It has to be someone who will be only doing the job of a coach and not try to be a selector.

The current set of selectors are unfortunately handicapped with the fitness policies they have chosen to adopt and also the type of players they keep selecting in spite of blatant shortcomings in their skills and techniques which is a total disaster. Past selection committees have also worked with foreign coaches and at no stage had they had any issues with them. They have always managed them with a lot of diplomacy giving them the due recognition of the role they play and at the same time bringing in their line of thinking and convincing them to have trust in their judgement as well.

At the moment there is no visible cohesion at all. The selectors are saying one thing, the coaches are doing another and suddenly SLC find themselves without a coach before major series. They bring in coaches to replace the national head coach’s position as stop gaps when these coaches were not even given junior teams to manage. If you are going to be playing in the big league you need professionals, the right people with proven credentials. But what we find is that those responsible for looking for a head coach do not want professionals but lackeys whom they can control and keep interfering with.

We have treated our foreign coaches with such disdain and disrespectfulness, we have acquired a very poor reputation as unreliable employers. We have lost the credibility in the eyes of the international cricketing community. All this is naturally having a devastating effect on the national team’s performances.

The first four T20Is against Australia were all one-sided, this was in spite of David Warner and Mitch Marsh, their T20 World Cup heroes being rested. After taking a winning 3-0 lead in the five-match series Australia rested a few more of their key players and Sri Lanka still lost the fourth T20I.

Sri Lanka won the fifth and final T20I because they improved their running between the wickets which made the difference. They should have been doing that from the very first game. When you count the number of dot balls our batsmen played in the first four games that in itself tells the story of how clueless our coaching staff is with the boys not running their singles and twos.

With a T20 World Cup round the corner it is not fair to blame the cricketers for the shortcomings of the SLC and the Tech committee who have to take the entire blame.

You cannot expect to be parachuting a head coach seven months before a major tournament like the World Cup and expect him to produce miracles. He needs to get a team working together and there has to be a lot of thought and planning going into it, including a meaningful working relationship between the selectors and coaching staff with the administration fully backing them with all the resources required. It is a process.

The high-profile Tech committee with all the superstars was brought in with the hope that there would be very clear guidelines set to get cricket on track, but they have not taken one proper decision which has been accepted and garnered support from the cricketing fraternity in this country. It is a clear case of the blind leading the blind to any casual observer.