Roshen Silva gets raw deal

by Rex Clementine

After a very good season of domestic cricket, middle-order batsman Roshen Silva was among the shortlisted players for the upcoming tour of Bangladesh but it seems he has made up his mind to move on. Roshen is currently in the UK playing league cricket and despite the selectors asking him to return home to face a fitness test, he has preferred to stay on in England and make a living by playing league cricket rather than returning to the Test fold.

While Sri Lanka Cricket has argued that Roshen should have shown commitment and returned home to face the fitness test, the board was not willing to pocket his airfare from the UK to Colombo. Roshen could have purchased the ticket on his own and come and faced the fitness test, but there was little guarantee that he would have featured in the Test series and in all probability, he would have warmed the bench in Bangladesh.

Roshen played little cricket during the pandemic and due to lack of match payments he had to find a way to look after his family. As he is not in the contracted list, he is not one of those players who gets a decent retainer from SLC and has to entirely depend on match fees. Although match fees are lucrative, when you don’t feature in games your earnings are little and Roshen seems to have made the tough choice of moving on.

One of the best players of spin bowling, Roshen has a decent Test record having posted a century and five fifties in his 12 Tests. His Test average of 35 is pretty decent while in domestic cricket he is nearing 10,000-run mark at an average close to 50.

While several players have got an extended run to find their feet in international cricket, Roshen has got a raw deal despite possessing decent numbers. It can be safely assumed that why he hasn’t got a decent run is because there aren’t any godfathers in cricket to back him.

The last straw for Roshen would have been the selectors overlooking him for the recent Indian series. He was one of the standout performers during Sri Lanka’s previous trip to India in 2017 where he saved the Delhi Test batting with back to the wall on a turning wicket against Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. What’s more, he was on debut!