By Revatha S. Silva
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If the authorities continue to relax on serious breach of discipline by the national players especially within the public domain, those officials too would be held responsible by the public if there will be any possible downfall of the Sri Lanka cricket in near future[/caption]
Another sex-related, behaviour-concerned, disciplinary scandal involving a current prominent Sri Lanka dashing batsman has emerged, this time from a New Year festival season party down south. The allegation again is concerning over sexual harassment.
This is the umpteenth time that the same white-ball dasher has got caught in similar disciplinary incident. And on all those occasions, for the utter amusement of the onlookers, he had been allowed to get off scot free and hence the repetition of the same bad behaviour again and again.
Have the beloved cricket spectators in this country have now decided to treat our current Sri Lanka players with “WWF-like” severe assault as the time is ripe, for they have got sick of their prolonged appalling display in the middle and off it?
Surely, the public have now settled not to tolerate the national cricketers’ hanky-panky, unlike during those years when they let those issues pass by, solely due to the respect and loyalty that they had for those earlier “Sri Lanka players”. That has been the bitter pill this prolific short-format batsman had to swallow allegedly in Matara last week.
Can some remedial action come out at least now and stem the flow of this usual rot? This time it might actually happen, one can hope, because all aspects of national cricket is now under an Administrative Committee headed by none other than Prof. Arjuna de Silva, a much respected professional in the fields of both medicine as well as sports, for many years. Over to you Professor, discipline is number-one for a national player, isn’t it?
Here you are flanked by the Director General of the Ministry of Sports Amal Edirisooriya too in the current five-member special administrative committee .
Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) yesterday (18) issued a statement saying that an inquiry had been launched “to ascertain validity of certain media reports which cited that a national player was involved in a brawl at a hotel recently.”
We would suggest that 100% ascertaining can be made by just giving a single telephone call to the relevant police station, as we in the media did. What’s more important is the kind of countermeasures and remedial action that SLC is going to take.
One was heard saying the other day that the eventual perpetrator of a recent alleged land grab reported in the media, related to a property situated near Sigiriya, was none other than King Kashyapa (for it was him who turned an odd, useless rock a fortress)!
Likewise, it will not be a wonder if these newspaper reports about “a Matara brawl” will become a non-issue at the end of the week.
If not, what happened to the recent hit-and-run incident where a father was killed, that too reportedly following a night club escapade? What really happened to the alleged “fixer-girl-in-your-room” incident and a foreign lady complaining about an attempted sexual assault on her?
It is certain that the punishments or reprimands handed to those perpetrators, if there were any, wouldn’t have been sufficient to discipline them and thus have not served the purpose. The same type of crimes are being repeated by the same players and what they destroy by doing so is the reputation which is much larger than single individuals. Their poor behaviour destroys the game’s appeal for future as well.
Prof. de Silva is better aware that when discipline crumbles in a team that is on a losing trend, the public agitation is high and uncontrollable.
It is very rare that the public has got together to physically assault a current Sri Lanka cricketer. This alleged incident reflects a very bad and fearful tendency.
Over to you Prof. and DG – Ministry of Sports!