Sore Losers

Honestly the Sri Lankan media is becoming more and more like their former colonial masters, and most of us are also becoming like a bunch of whingeing Poms. Seriously, guys! It’s a game of cricket and sometimes a guy gets in a zone. Like Gilly in 2007 and Rohit Sharma yesterday. It happens. It’s shit when it happens against us, but hey. Sometimes you’re watching football and the entire team is shit, but the goalkeeper has an amazing day and his shitty team end up winning. That stuff happens in sport. Especially in a ridiculously variable, fortune oriented game like cricket.

And it’s not like Rohit’s 264 was not symptomatic of the problems that we have been having all season. You can’t change the opposition, and you don’t get to decide when their batsmen are going to have a good day or not. Rohit was dropped on 4. A very takeable catch. Similarly, in the first match two chances off the two centurions went down. Fielding has been a problem I have been highlighting for the last 18 months and finally, FINALLY, the message seems to have hit home and Trevor Penney has been appointed as field coach. The rationale for that decision aside, this series has been lost because of poor fielding which allowed the Indian batsmen to take the games away from us. Happily, fielding should be, and I hope it is, the most easily fixable of the three disciplines.

So instead of making cracks and insulting Nishantha Ranatunga – all of which he deserves – I think he’s actually done us a favour by highlighting how important the little things are. Dropped catches lead to thrashings. Yes, the old adage of catches win matches is still true, but I doubt that we were doing much about it, or would have been until now.

So in that sense, these thrashings have exposed Sri Lanka’s weaknesses. What needs to be done now is for a plan and a schedule to be drawn up in order to address those weakness with a view to peaking slowly in January when we go to New Zealand.

What is upsetting is that people get so het up, and call the opposition names and say rude things about Sharma. He played a magnificent innings. It was some of the cleanest hitting I have ever seen. That flick from wide outside off stump for six over mid wicket was something unbelivable. That is incredible timing. And Sri Lankan fans, if they pride themselves on being different from Indian fans, should be able to applaud the magnitude of Rohit’s feat. That’s not what I’m seeing from the media or from social media. And that is a little upsetting.

Especially since we knew how badly organised this tour was, we shouldn’t have expected much more than this. There’s also little to be gained by going on about how ill timed the tour was. Let’s move the fuck on please. Take it for what it is. Realise what we need to fix and make sure we do that without pointing fingers and apportioning blame.

Accountability is good. But if that doesn’t exist, finger pointing becomes a waste of energy.