Doomsday at Pallekele

by Rex Clementine

Everyone following Sri Lankan cricket are still trying to come to terms with what happened on Tuesday night. Sri Lanka needed nine runs in 12 balls with six wickets in hand and this should have been match over with an over to spare. This is less than what South Africa had to chase in the T-20 World Cup final in Barbados against India. South Africa choked. So did Sri Lanka. Our team probably are the new chokers of cricket.

You barely could believe what you were seeing at Pallekele. Some 20,000 fans left the ground kicking themselves while 20 million adoring fans knocked off the televisions thinking it was a bad dream. Not a dream but a nightmare.

It was a mockery indeed for Sri Lanka lost four wickets for four runs and there was total chaos. A mockery because Rinku Singh, who bowled the penultimate over and Suryakumar Yadav, who sent down the final over had never bowled before in T20 Internationals. How can you gift four wickets to two bowlers who had never rolled their arm over? It summed up the status of our cricket. Players cannot handle pressure and their game sense is well below par. Our priority should not be getting down a coach soon but a good sports psychologist who will help players deal with situations.

Kusal Perera is the culprit number one. He is the only current Sri Lankan cricketer to have played in a World Cup winning team. He is a former captain and has represented Sri Lanka for over ten years. Furthermore, he was the inform batter. This should have been a cake walk for him. But he threw it all away in one moment of madness.

Nine runs in 12 balls means picking singles and twos by finding the gap. Perera knew that the middle order was in crisis, but yet he attempted to pull and ended up giving a return catch. It was so hilarious that India’s Head Coach Gautam Gambhir could not stop laughing.

The series had been already lost but there’s something called pride. Sri Lanka showed no pride on Tuesday. The fans were booing. A proud cricket nation does not deserve this kind of treatment.

The players need to do soul searching. They behave like models and not professional sportsmen. They have much to learn from our women’s cricketers who last week humbled mighty India.

You can understand one collapse. It happens in cricket. You can also pardon collapses in successive games for this is a funny game. But to collapse in three games in a row is inexcusable.

That’s not all. Sri Lanka women have won series in England and South Africa in the last 18 months. They have also won home series against West Indies and New Zealand. The fault is with the players. The men’s cricket team lacks priorities in life. They should be ashamed of themselves. There needs to be some good soul searching. They have dug themselves into this mess and they need to get out of it. Sooner the better.