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National Super League selections made NOT by national selectors!

28 Mar 2022

  • Respective team coaches make the selections, to their own whims and fancies! 
By Revatha S. Silva The whole purpose of the glamorous idea of the National Super League (NSL) is lost, one can argue. The five teams of what is projected as the prime first-class cricket tournament of the country, which will stand as the main criteria for national team selections, are picked by the team coaches with no involvement from the national selection committee, The Morning Sports understood. The NSL 50-over tournament was over on 19 February, after 21 matches, with team Jaffna emerging as champions. Then began the NSL four-day tournament on 24 February, again with five teams taking part, namely Colombo, Dambulla, Galle, Jaffna, and Kandy. Now the way the four-day tournament is run has not heralded its anticipated results. Not up to the mark “All first-class club teams have been scattered among the five district teams for the NSL. But the team selections are not done properly. A couple of Colombo clubs are dominating the NSL teams,” a Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) source said yesterday (28). “Many players, who are playing in the NSL four-dayer, are nowhere near the first-class standard. We wonder how they have been picked. The expected meaning and purpose of the whole tournament is lost,” he added. Unwanted things “Some players are continuing to play despite having failed continuously. In the meantime, some NSL team coaches are trying to absorb players from their club teams pledging them possible places in the national side in future,” said the above source. “These are the unwanted things that can happen when the selection is not supervised by a single body in the first-class tournament,” he further explained. Tug-o-war “Apparently the National Selection Committee (under Pramodya Wickramasinghe, with Romesh Kaluwitharana and Hemantha Wickramaratne as the other two members) is not involved in the NSL selections. If the main first-class tournament is not conducted under the supervision of the national selectors, how can that serve its purpose?” reiterated the SLC source. One reason for the evident disintegration is the ongoing power struggle between the SLC and the other two power centres of national cricket administration – the Technical Advisory Committee and Mahela Jayawardene who is the National Consultant Coach and the Chairman of the National Sports Council. Our effort to contact National Selection Committee Head Wickramasinghe failed yesterday. New format too is disappointing The NSL, notably, came up as a remedy to the years-long discrepancy in the country’s premier first-class tournament. There was a severe accusation from many quarters that as many as 25-odd clubs in the main domestic tournament is way too much and the excessive quantity had deteriorated the tournament’s quality. SLC, the organisers of the NSL, took the blame for maintaining such a high number of clubs in its first-class fold for the alleged benefit of maintaining their vote base. With the number of teams cut down to five in the newly-introduced NSL, there was an expectation that the tournament will raise the standards of our first-class cricket from this year. But, with the respective coaches taking control of the team selections and the visible disintegration of its running, the expected qualitative difference will only be another daydream, one can assume. The inaugural NSL four-dayer will end up this season with the semi-finals, scheduled from Thursday (31), and the final, which is set to be held from 7-10 April in Galle.


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