Our batters failed to adapt – Kandamby

Rex Clementine
in St. Lucia

Following Sri Lanka’s exit in the ICC T-20 World Cup without making it to the second round, the team’s Batting Coach Thilina Kandamby lamented the batters’ approach against South Africa and Bangladesh that cost the team a slot in the Super Eight stage of the 20 nation tournament.

The team did get their act together in St. Lucia when they beat Netherlands comfortably after the match against Nepal was washed out, but it was too late by then.

“It has been a challenging campaign. Preparations I thought we did well. We worked hard at training. I don’t want to blame the wickets for our loss, but we failed to execute our plans. The batters didn’t adapt to conditions. All our preparation was gone after just two batting flops,” Kandamby, former Sri Lanka Under-19 captain told reporters.

In both games that Sri Lanka lost in New York and Dallas, the batters were dismissed trying to execute big shots, but their game plan seemed to have changed in St. Lucia where they relied more on converting singles into twos and twos into threes.

“Our game plan we tried to get more twos. First game we made less than 80 runs. The second game was a small ground and we couldn’t execute the plan. St. Lucia was big. So, we could run hard and put pressure on the fielders. It is the confidence that was lacking.

There have been questions asked whether Sri Lanka brought the best squad to the World Cup. Lack of power hitting has been one thing that has been discussed in many corners. But Kandamby was happy with the composition of the side.

“This is the best team that we can bring. We haven’t had many power hitters over the years. Even when we won the World Cup in 2014 apart from Thisara Perera, we didn’t have many power hitters. We had lot of classical players. We played different brands of cricket. If you look at our stats, across all three formats since January this year, we have hit 150 sixes. That’s a decent number.”

Sri Lanka returned home from St. Lucia Monday morning. It’s long journey back home with transits in Miami and Dubai. The players have couple of weeks lead up to the Lanka Premier League followed by the white ball series against India at home that begins in early August.