Politics of cricket - part II:

Old or new blood? Kaluperuma's bad error

by Michael Roberts

Since October 2005 Sri Lanka's cricket team have had a roller-coaster ride on the cricket field, for the most part in difficult series played abroad in circumstances marked by (a) horrendous scheduling on occasions (VB series), (b) sheer misfortune on occasions (Marvan losing the toss most of time in India) and (c) poor umpiring weighing against them (virtually everywhere).

Equally striking has been the hypercritical commentary by a number of keen fans who have hacked away at some of the senior cricketers in the process. Over the last 8 months some fans have dismissed Marvan, Sanath and Mahela from their squads at various moments and inserted youngsters from out of the blue, sometime on the basis of one outstanding score in some ODI game or 20/20 match in the domestic circuit.

Disparaging comments

The prejudiced animus directed at Mahela Jayawardene during and immediately after the series in India by some of the regular contributors to the Forum in www.cricket.dilmahtea.com was quite unbelievable. Indeed, it was veritable witch hunt. Likewise Sanath Jayasuriya attracted a series of disparaging comments after the ODI series in India and after the first game in New Zealand.

There was reasonable concern everywhere about the fact that several of our players, Marvan, Sanath, Murali and Vaas were entering the twilight stage of their careers. The need to try out prospective replacements was evident to one and all. But the issue I have raised in my previous article is whether one needed a virtual squadron of young batsmen, four in sum, in the touring team for England; and whether Jayasuriya should have been forcibly persuaded to retire from the Test arena.

I ventured to challenge this set of decisions. This essay is further elaboration of my thinking. Before taking up the case of Jayasuriya the man, I begin here by challenging the premise on which these lines of argument have been pressed, namely, the assumption that once a cricketer is about 35-36 years old he has passed his use-by date. In my view the mechanical application of this concept is as silly as, well, mechanical.

Players such as Tom Graveney, Colin Cowdrey and the Don himself played good cricket into their early 40s. Graveney (b. June 1927) scored 75 runs in one innings versus the West Indies in June 1969 at the age of 42. Cowdrey toured Australia with the MCC at the age of 41/42. But, of course, that was in an era when the demands of cricket were not as exacting on the body in comparison with the annual round of ODI and Test matches today.

But take the demanding county circuit in England. Last year's winner of Division One was Notts CC. And guess who the key contributors for the Nottinghamshire side were? Darren Bicknell (b. 24 June 1967 and aged 38 then), Mark Ealham (b. August 1969 and aged 36) and Jason Gallian (b 24 June 1971 and aged 34). All these men are still playing for Notts this year.Nor does age reduce capacity and fighting spirit in equal measure on a universal scale.

Capacity to play

One test of an aging player's capacities is his round of fielding skills, keeping in mind one specific role: can the skipper place the fellow in the inner ring at crucial stages of an ODI game? Broken down into categories (clearly these overlap), the fielding skills are: (A) acceleration and speed of foot over short distances; (N) nimbleness and suppleness of body in getting down to the ball; and (SC) sureness of hand, that is, catching reliability. In my assessment A and N are intimately connected: those quick are usually supple.

Leaving capacity SC out of the reckoning because I do not have comprehensive data, I proceed to ask questions about the capacities of certain older players in the SL team circle in relation to skills A and N. Clearly, the best assessments are only available to viewers who watch matches live.

On TV one only sees snatches of performance - useful yes but still not complete. Yes, we all know that Dilshan (aged 30) is the quickest and best of the fielders, but how do the others rate in speed off the mark relative to each other, my criteria A?

The best knowledge, of course, reposes with Moody, Penney and the players themselves. This arises not only because they see other's performance regularly, but also because they are pitted against each other during fitness and fielding exercises. Short sprints in company are part of their regime.

So, when I was in Sri Lanka recently I asked one observer of these training exercises whether the Youngies were quicker than the Oldies. The answer was revealing: only Lasith Malinga could match the Oldies in speed and acceleration.

Wow! Dwell a moment on this fact. But first let me insert some caveats of a speculative kind: (a) Murali cannot throw himself around as freely as he did in his younger days because he has to nurse his shoulder; (b) I suspect that Vaas is not quite as quick as Sanath, Marvan, Russel, Murali, Chandana, Gayan Wijekoon, Mahela (aged 29) and Kumar (aged 29); and that (c)Chamara Kapugedera is virtually up there with Lasith Malinga and the Oldies, certainly in nimbleness and capacity in the inner ring.

But the point of all this is to stress that Tharanga and Malinga Bandara on the one hand would appear to be a couple of notches behind the Oldies, while Maharoof and Vandort (together with Avishka) are much slower in when comparison with Sanath (30 June 1969), who is now 37 years old.

And Atapattu, b. Nov. 1970, aged 35, what of him? Despite a troublesome back he fielded magnificently during the ODI series in Kiwiland and Ozland early this year.

I was keeping an eye on this aspect of the game and was consistently impressed by his mobility. Located at short-and-wide mid-off or at short extra over on many occasions, he missed one tough catch, a cracker of a shot, but caught another sizzling drive and took what I consider to be a remarkable catch off McCallum in New Zealand. Everyone oohed-and-aahed about Dilshan's goalkeeper catch at backward point during that series, but, boy, Marvan's was better: better because it was an unusual catch, looping quickly off the handle of bat to be taken over his shoulder by Marvan as he contorted himself backwards.

That said, at the end of the tour in February I felt that, given a strained back, Marvan would be the earliest to retire from the cricket stage. Indeed Tissera told me that Marvan had indicated that the tour of England would be his last Test series.

His back-problem, as we know, even knocked that idea out of the menu. This is where Sanath struck me as being different: observing the players in Australia I had no doubt about Sanath's eagerness for the game and his bodily capacities in terms of agility around the paddock. Those capacities do not guarantee sharpness of eye or continuity of batting skill. Given Sanath's batting technique, and some of its weaknesses, an aging eye could pose problems.

From Aubrey Kuruppu's comments, I gather that his three innings in the Test arena against Pakistan at home were poor.

The inter-related issues at the end of the Pakistan series, then, were these: was this a bad trot, the sort that any batsman goes through? Or was it a permanent debility? Secondly, was his will and zest for the longer version of the game on the wane?

The answer to these questions bear on the decision taken by the powers-that-be in SLC circles to ask him to retire so that they could give more youngsters top-level experience. In my view, as the evidence I have marshaled in this article displays, Sanaths' body and spirit were still well honed and he had the competitive zest for the challenges of any cricket field.

There may have been a question mark about his batting. But Sanath was/is also an all-rounder, whose bowling is useful and far better than the youngsters in contention who bowl a bit (Mubarak, Daniel), while the others (Vandort, Tharanga and Kapugedera) did not usually bowl at all). Thus, especially in circumstances where Atapattu was in extreme doubt for the series against England, it was prudent to rely on his experience and retain him in the touring squad without any promise that he would be part of the final XI.

Decision

The decision taken by Kaluperuma and Company therefore was a bad error. This does not mean that Ashantha de Mel was on the right track in the way he went about resurrecting Sanath's career. The comments he made were totally unprofessional.

Moody, Penney and others did a marvellous job in difficult situations in both New Zealand and Australia, where the side played good cricket most of the time.

For anyone to take seriously the ICI ranking scheme - with its lottery element deriving from where and whom one has played in the immediate half-year before one looks at the ranking (when in fact there is usually little difference between the sides ranked 2/3 and those 5/6) - is quite asinine.