Posts Tagged: Sri Lanka

0Sachithra Senanayake Mankades (try saying that after a few beers!)

Crick­et is a sport in which most fol­low­ers expect their her­oes to adhere to a high­er stand­ard of fair play and sportsmanship.
The recent incid­ent of ‘Mankad­ing’ (who on earth coined that phrase?) – when Sri Lanka’s Sachi­thra Sen­anayake ran out England’s Jos But­tler who had strayed out of his crease at the non-striker’s end at a key point in the final and decid­ing ODI in the series was dis­ap­point­ing to see and thank­fully remains very rare.
The last incid­ent I can remem­ber is when Kapil Dev ran out South Africa’s Peter Kirsten, appar­ently without warn­ing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzbFy_elb8k
Dif­fer­ing accounts of Tuesday’s shambles say Sen­anayake warned But­tler twice or just the once. Either way, it wasn’t crick­et. The bowl­er shouldn’t have done it and the cap­tain should have over-ruled the appeal. He didn’t, it happened so we are left to count the cost of a strain on the game.
What I don’t like, how­ever, is Eng­land using this unsa­voury con­tro­versy to shield yet anoth­er highly mixed per­form­ance dur­ing a ODI series.
Sri Lanka are a decent side – but without the wick­et tak­ing machine that was Mut­ti­ah Mur­a­lithar­an in the line-up and home advant­age you would have expec­ted Eng­land to win the series.… Read Full Article

0Australia Boxing Clever

Eng­lish win­ters are a ter­rible thing. Cold and wet, the sea­son also means no home crick­et whatsoever.

Christ­mas is one shin­ing light in the fog of the cold and to add to this the thought of an annu­al test match that starts on Box­ing Day and usu­ally held under blue skies and warm tem­per­at­ures is one that stirs the ima­gin­a­tion and one that I will raise a cold beer to.

Box­ing Day tests have been held every year since 1980 (except 1989 when a one day match vs Sri Lanka was played instead (boo – ed) and at the Mel­bourne Crick­et Club in Aus­tralia – aka the MCG). They have also been dom­in­ated by some massive crowds (which have approached six fig­ures on occa­sion). Read Full Article

0Bangladesh v Sri Lanka CricketCricket: A Testing Future?

The oth­er day I had the brief pleas­ure of watch­ing Bangladesh versus Sri Lanka on the goggle box. It only las­ted about an hour as oth­er fam­ily mem­bers suc­ceeded in pris­ing the remote away from me as soon as my back was turned.

But it was test crick­et at its best. There wasn’t a flurry of wick­ets and only a few runs were scored but from the per­spect­ive of the game it couldn’t have been more vital.

The awe­some and ever green middle order bats­man Kumar Sangakkara had craf­ted yet anoth­er fine cen­tury as he looked to mar­shal the tail to get a mean­ing­ful first innings lead over the hosts. Sri Lanka had a lead of around 40 runs with only four wick­ets in hand. Grip­ping test match crick­et as the game ebbed and flowed.

The sad thing was the crowd – or lack of. I wasn’t there I could only see what the TV beamed back. But from what I could see it was like watch­ing a second XI match in terms of bums on seats. It was the pro­ver­bi­al ‘one man and his dog’ stuff.… Read Full Article