Malinga's candid admission of why Lankan cricket is in freefall

Tags: India tour of Sri Lanka 2017, Sri Lanka v India 5th ODI at Colombo, Sep 03, 2017, Sri Lanka, Separamadu Lasith Malinga, Chamara Kantha Kapugedera, Team Captain

Published on: Sep 02, 2017

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Lasith Malinga, who captained Sri Lanka in the fourth one-dayer after Chamarajanagar Kapugedera was ruled out admitted the Lankans are missing experience out in the middle.

Lasith Malinga, who captained Sri Lanka in the fourth one-dayer after Chamarajanagar Kapugedera was ruled out admitted the Lankans are missing experience out in the middle.

Sri Lanka have lost all the three Tests and four ODIs played so far against India. Analysing the same, Malinga told the media, “What I personally think is that our problems are because we lost a generation of players. If that generation was here, we wouldn’t have an inexperienced team like this. We had players like Chamara Silva, Thilina Kandamby, Jehan Mubarak, Malinga Bandara, Kaushal. They played about ten years of domestic cricket by the time they were 29 or 30, and played internationals for two or three years, and then they were out of the international scene,” Malinga was quoted as saying in a Wisden India report.

“We lost that ten-twelve years of experience from them. It’s really hard to get that experience from a fresh-out-of-school cricketer or a club cricketer. The loss of that generation is being felt in our cricket. If they had still been here, we would have had the ability to field six or seven experienced players in the team. When I started playing in 2004, there were seven or eight experienced players in the team. A few years ago we lost that. Now our cricket has declined,” he candidly admitted.

Malinga added that the team needed to be given time to build one for the 2019 World Cup. “We need to be patient. We need to get together as a country. If we keep criticising everyone one by one, we will keep getting these new teams. We have to protect the players we have. The current thinking is always ‘the player who is in the team is bad, but the one outside deserves a place’,” he explained.

--By A Cricket Correspondent

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