The cricketer's speech

by Indi Samarajiva | July 09, 2011

Cricketer Kumar Sangakkara is also a lawyer. Looks like he may need one.

For a change, the former Sri Lanka captain did not let his bat do all the talking.

The image above is from paddynapper's photostream on Flickr here and has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

The response from Sri Lanka’s cricket administration to his comments on, well, poor cricket administration has been received with a wide harrumph and the traditional call for an investigation. How does one investigate a speech? Listen to it? This is the usual window dressing for the defenestration of the messenger.

Sanga’s 2011 M.C.C. Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture was quite literally about the spirit of cricket. In his wide-ranging comments, the discussion of corruption plays only a bit part. That bit has been magnified in the news, but if you listen to his speech what sticks are his stories about the attack on the team bus in Pakistan – “Oh my God, you were out first ball, run out the next innings, and now you have been shot. What a terrible first tour!” – and his childhood comments on the 1983 race riots – “Is this going to happen every year as it is so much fun having all my friends live with us.”

What comes across in Sanga’s speech is the spirit of cricket, of Sri Lankan cricket in particular, which we see everyday. Underneath that, however, there was some fairly revolutionary rhetoric.

“Loyal fans are becoming increasingly disillusioned. This is very dangerous because it is not the administrators or players that sustain the game– it is the cricket-loving public. It is their passion that powers cricket and if they turn their backs on cricket then the whole system will come crashing down.”

What he is implying here is that Sri Lanka’s cricket administrators govern by consent and that their power can be revoked just like any Arab dictator. This is completely true, and thus completely shocking to hear out loud.

In Sri Lanka, the cricket administration has been in the news for doing stupid things and then covering it up by doing something even more stupid. What people here are amazed at is that someone prominent is finally saying something. It really was about time.

It all began with the World Cup. With all due respect to India, it wasn’t your win as much as Sri Lanka’s loss. On the eve of the final, Sri Lankan selectors changed almost half of the team. On the day of the match, that half messed things up in style. Watching at home, we groaned each time one of the novices took the pitch, shattering whatever momentum the team had built. It felt unfair, it felt unreal, and it felt absurd. In other words, the usual Sri Lankan chaos.

The Cup before that, for example, the light ran out on our cricketers in the West Indies just as Colombo fell under attack from L.T.T.E. planes. Everything went black for us as well. A plane crashed into the Tax Department and the Sri Lankan team crashed against Australia. It was one of the most depressing days, ever.

The 2011 World Cup was somehow worse because this time it was entirely our fault. Something had gone wrong. And it had gone wrong at an administrative level. Personally, I blamed Sanga and was glad that he took the axe as captain. When Mahela Jayawardena dodged the captaincy like it was an axe however, it appeared that something was fundamentally broken. These, the most respected cricketers, were refusing to participate in something that had gone terribly wrong.

True to form, the cricket administration responded to this by doubling down. First they made a public show of trying to pull Sri Lankans out of the Indian Premier League (“the IPL”), dividing the team against the new captain, Dilshan Tillekeratne. He took a futile stand with the Board, but the IPL went on as usual. The cricket administration just looked bad.

Then they tried to force Lasith Malinga to play Test cricket despite a bad knee. This was again motivated by jealousy that he was playing much shorter T20 matches in India. He responded by quitting Test cricket altogether. At this point you would think that the Cricket Board would back down, but no, you haven’t been listening. When in a hole, dig harder.

The response to being ignored in the IPL was like Trishanku’s response to being denied mortal access to heaven (as told in the Ramayana). They found a guru to build them their own. This guru turned out to be a dodgy Singaporean company with no experience and their heaven - the Sri Lanka Premier League - is neither here nor there.

No one has bought the international television rights, Indian players have refused to play, and other players aren’t even sure whether they should book their flights. This is just two weeks before the scheduled start.

It doesn’t take a lawyer or an investigation to see that something is wrong, but it will take some bureaucracy to obscure the guilty parties - the cricket administration, the Sports Minister, and even the President and the ruling family. All have meddled with Sri Lanka cricket in harmful ways.

The Board is merely incompetent and corrupt, probably the least of the several sins. The Sports Minister is responsible for much worse. The President has presided, loaning his witch doctor to players (who gave them steroids, getting Upul Tharanga banned), involving his sons through television stations and Bollywood celebrity matches, and generally not stepping in (as the only person with real power) to set things right.

Sanga has pointed the mess out a lot more delicately than I, also without assigning blame. As a solution, he’s recommended following the I.C.C.’s latest ruling forbidding political interference with an independent board, which would be the legal course of affairs. However, it seems that the cricket administration is incapable of responding with similar finesse. The Sports Minister has called for an investigation into… the speech.

To their credit, Sri Lankan cricketers usually stay well away from politics or opinions of any sort. In this case, however, enough was enough. Sri Lanka cricket truly is losing the support of loyal fans, and this is a serious concern. As Shehan Karunatilaka wrote in Chinaman, “unlike life, sport matters.”

You can mess up the economy, sell land to China, and suspend the Constitution. You can fight wars, take money, and arrest innocent people. Sri Lanka has known all of this for decades and we have our ways of coping. Just don’t mess with cricket. Sometimes it’s all we have.

Indi Samarajiva is a blogger (www.indi.ca). He grew up in the western parts of Sri Lanka and lives in Colombo. If you want to know what he's thinking right now you can follow him on Twitter (twitter.com/indica), or Facebook (facebook.com/indiblog).