Sri Lanka making Mockery of cricket

Captaincy By Consensus

The last match in the group A at the super eights stage of the world T20 world cup brought something strange in my opinion. Sri Lanka were in all probability into the semifinals but not quite and England had it all to play for after West Indies had beaten New Zealand in a thrilling match which went into a super over. The strange thing was that Kumar Sangakara captained the side even though appointed captained Mahela Jayawardena also lined up to take on England.

From where I was sitting in my bedroom, I did not see anything to suggest that sangakara was the man who was doing the captaining when Sri Lanka were in the field. The explanation that was given at the toss was that the designate captain had lost three consecutive tosses so why not try a change. That to me is totally crazy. Cricket matches are not decided by what happens at the tosses. You have to play well for the duration of the match to win the match. Toss is merely there to start to the match. The better team on the field should win the match.

In my years of watching cricket I have never seen anything like that, the closest to this that I have seen is when Brian Murphy was the captain of Zimbabwe and dropped himself and handed Stuart Carlisle the captaincy when he thought he was not amongst the best eleven. In another example in 2008 we saw Indian Captain MS Dhoni letting Sourav Ganguly captain the Indian team in the last session in his last test against Australia, but by that time the match and the series had both been well wrapped up. One both of these instances one could understand the logic and the sentiment behind the decision.

This however is totally different and I find it really hard to get my head round it. It is as bad as john Buchanan’s multiple captain theory that he had in mind for Kolkata Knight Riders in 2009 when IPL was held in South Africa. Thankfully he aborted it.

I know Jayawardena and Sangakara are good friends and no disruptions would have been caused in the team but the theory on the face of it looks flawed. Conventional wisdom has it that you don’t want former captains in your team as they could be one of those bad apples.

For me it just comes up a little desperate that you would want to do something as dramatic as that just to win a toss, rather than concentrating on playing the game itself. Good that they lost the toss, may teach them something.

I wonder what a Sri Lankan cricket fan or authorities at Sri Lanka cricket think of this.

Let me know what you think.

Comments Welcome