A head coach in Sri Lanka is screened and interviewed before being appointed, and rightly so. However, it is not the case with a chief selector or anyone who is appointed to neutralize the powers of the coach and carry out the board’s agenda for that matter. You could be an old dude enjoying your retirement time sprawling in the ...
During the press conference following the conclusion of the first day of the second Test against Ireland at Galle, Piyal Wijetunga, the national spin bowling coach of Sri Lanka had no qualms throwing his 11-Test-old protégé Ramesh Mendis under the bus for his poor show in the first innings. What was even more concerning was his passing reference to ...
Dunith Wellalage made his international debut in the first ODI between Sri Lanka and Australia. Courtesy: Twitter (@OfficialSLC) “Wella…Wella…Wella…”, chanted the Sri Lankan crowd that had thronged the stadium when Dunith Wellalage came back to bowl his second spell in the third ODI between Sri Lanka and Australia. In a way, it was heartening to see how a teenage prodigy ...
Courtesy: ICC via Getty Sri Lanka’s run in the 2021 T20 World Cup may have come to an end but that has not stopped the island nation from regaling itself with the firm belief that they have unearthed new stars for the future, and with prophecies about the return of their halcyon days. Have Sri Lanka actually turned a corner ...
Criticisms have been rife against the Sri Lankan head coach for the lack of improvement in the fortune of the nation’s cricket team. Experts and fans alike have started to call for his head, and with the recent ministerial interventions, it is becoming clear by the day that an axe is indeed hanging over him. It has only been ...
This was supposed to be Sri Lanka’s second-string side. As many as ten ‘top-flight’ cricketers had withdrawn from the tour of Pakistan owing to security concerns. A wholesale drubbing was in the offing, many thought. After all, how could you expect the juniors to succeed where the seniors had failed? Nevertheless, the outcome wasn’t exactly a surprise, much less an ...
Hathurusingha’s hiring was only a part of Sumathipala’s PR strategy. Chandika Hathurusingha was only a brand. As Thilanga Sumathipala was trying every trick up his sleeves to somehow ingratiate himself with the public through cricket, after having failed to get elected into the Parliament during the last general election, his last-ditch effort to augment his public image was to ...
Courtesy: AP Photo Surely, you must be kidding, right? How can you not pick someone who has scored 562 runs in 19 innings at an average of 29.57 in T20Is? Someone who has scored two fifties in his last two series? Someone, to top everything off, is now among the top ten T20I batters in the world? Definitely, this must ...
It might soon become a reality. Or has it already? I can see you scowling at the screen. Probably, you are only a millisecond away from scrolling down to see if it is a prank. “Is it a click bait?”, you wonder. “It could very well be a title concocted by combining two random phrases by a bot to increase ...
Courtesy: Sri Lanka Cricket The third edition of the Lanka Premier League concluded recently with Jaffna scoring a hat-trick of championships by beating Colombo in the final. Even though this season was a damp squib as the mainstays of Sri Lanka’s T20I team failed to impress mostly, it did unearth a few talents and allowed a few national players to ...
Courtesy: X The Impact Player rule introduced in 2023 allows teams in the IPL to substitute a player in their XI with an Impact Player at certain stages of a game. Even though teams can use this to lengthen either their batting or bowling, the common belief is that teams deepen their batting with the additional player, and that has ...
Courtesy: AFP Earlier this year, South Africa’s Dean Elgar retired from Tests, eliciting discussions on X about the best contemporary Test openers. A few weeks later, there was another discussion on Sri Lanka’s greatest test batsmen. Missing from both conversations was Dimuth Karunaratne, which was not at all surprising given his very low profile. This article tries to fill this ...
The legendary Sri Lankan batsman, Mahela Jayawardena, has been appointed as the head coach of the Indian Premier League franchise, Mumbai Indians. The team based in Mumbai broke the news on Twitter today tweeting “We welcome one of the most elegant & graceful batsmen of the modern era, Mahela Jayawardena, as the new head coach of Mumbai Indians”. Australia’s ...
First Graeme Labrooy, who was seemingly Hathurusingha’s underling, was fired. Then, the incoming chief-selector went straight for Chandimal’s jugular as he took to task the Test skipper’s poor captaincy. No sooner than Samaraweera was axed and a new batting coach was appointed, Hathurusingha was evicted from the selection committee. Finally, Chandimal was dropped from the Test team and Dimuth ...
The administrators and the management refuse to acknowledge the flaws in the system while they try to pretend that everything is okay in Sri Lanka cricket. I don’t know how you felt about Sri Lanka’s inability to win any of the series against Bangladesh at home this season. But, I, a diehard Sri Lanka cricket fan all my life, was ...
LONDON, ENGLAND – JUNE 11: during day three of the 3rd Investec Test match between England and Sri Lanka at Lord’s Cricket Ground on June 11, 2016 in London, United Kingdom. The runs that the tail makes are always decisive. From forming a rear guard to eke out a draw to frustrating the bowlers after they having done all the ...
Sri Lanka’s expected, recent defeat at the hands of England was their fifth straight loss to them at home. Quite predictably, it was the batsmen who were put in dock as the pundits and the fandom impetuously pinned the blame solely on the first innings performance that saw the home team trundle their way to 135 all out. Sri Lanka ...
Sri Lanka has never been short of raucous batsmen who threatened many a bowler’s careers. From the likes of CI Gunasekara to the likes of Duleep Mendis, Aravinda de Silva and Sanath Jayasuriya, Sri Lankan batsmen have always been a thorn in the flesh of international bowlers. Here, we are going to take a look at all those bowlers ...
The International Olympic Committee has stripped Usain Bolt of the gold medal he won in the 4x100m relay in the 2008 Olympics following his teammate Nesta Carter’s failure in the drug test. In the re-tests of his samples, Carter was found to have consumed the banned stimulant methylhexaneamine. Instead of promoting the silver medallists to gold, IOC has taken ...
Niroshan Dickwella had dyed his hair during the T20I series. Ⓒ Sameera Peiris, thepapare.com. All members of the Sri Lankan cricket team have been asked to refrain from dying their hair and wearing piercings by a top Sri Lanka Cricket official, according to Ada.lk. Some of the Sri Lankan cricketers are known for their wacky, oddball hairdos with Sri Lanka’s ...
