‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude,’ is a famous William Shakespeare quotation for ingratitude.

That’s exactly what any eminent cricket administrator (book keepers and timber merchants excluded) of the country would have felt had they listened to Sri Lanka ‘Captain Grumpy’ Mahela Jayawardene yesterday.

Facing the media for the first time since a horrendous tour of Australia, Jayawardene ungraciously blamed a host of factors for the defeat conveniently forgetting that Sri Lanka played alarmingly poor cricket throughout the summer.

It’s Sri Lanka school cricket and domestic tournaments that had helped Jayawardene to rise up the ranks and get where he is at the moment. Thanks to the system and excellent coaching that we have, Jayawardene is one of the richest men in the country and recently even secured a handsome contract with English county Derbyshire for the next season. But yesterday, Jayawardene kicked the ladder that had helped him to reach the zenith.

He went onto add that India and Australia had been making steady progress because their domestic cricket had improved over the period, forgetting that the same domestic structure had helped Sri Lanka to win the World Cup in 1996.

Apparently, the Provincial Cricket tournament that was re-launched last year is much better than the first class tournament that involves the clubs. But, then it is not certain whether the Provincial Tournament will continue because of a cramped up Future Tour Programmes. If Jayawardene is so concerned about the domestic cricket what commitment can he show? Can he talk through all his colleagues of the national team and ask them to throw away their Indian Premier League Rupees and play in the Provincial tournament which he’s so concerned about.

Domestic tournament wasn’t Jayawardene’s only concern. Having insisted that they had picked the right side, Jayawadene told us a fairytale where one particular bowler overnight started to develop a problem with his follow through while some of the batsmen all of a sudden looked out of sort. "Chanaka was one of our best bowlers when we picked him. We realized that he was having a problem in Australia. I don’t know how he picked that up," the captain explained.

Jayawardene either is not aware of what’s going around or is simply trying to hoodwink us. There were reports to suggest that Welagedara was struggling with his follow through leading up to the Australian series and the question was why a passenger was carried in such an important series.

He wasn’t man enough to admit that Sri Lanka had taken one too many fast bowlers to Australia and were short of a specialist batsman. The team clearly lacked a middle order batsman and despite Chamara Silva having no clue where his next run was going to come, the team had to persist with him.

And he has mastered the skill of blaming the media when things are falling apart, a ploy that had been practised by successive Sri Lankan captains.

"If you take the case of Chamara Silva, he was our best middle order batsman during the World Cup. He had a very consistent year in 2007. Now, you all have labeled him as not so a good player," Jayawardene said querying, "is it fair enough?"

No one actually questioned Chamara Silva’s ability. We also admit that for Sri Lanka to go that far in the World Cup, Silva’s contribution mattered a lot, but at present, he looks out of form and whether he should have been picked for this West Indies series is a question.

Similarly, you wonder why Jayawardene didn’t treat Upul Tharanga the same way as Chamara Silva, especially with a crisis of that magnitude. Tharanga was going through a similar bad patch during the World Cup, but he thought it fit to keep a player of the magnitude of Marvan Atapattu out of the side and it’s baffling why he was chopped after just one game here.

All that Jayawardene had to say at the media briefing was that they were simply not good enough and played some bad cricket and didn’t deserve to win. But, instead, Jayawardene complicated the issue and it’ll be interesting to see how he’ll resolve those issues.

After all, Jayawardene now has the worst record by a Sri Lankan captain in Australia. It was not long ago that he became the first Sri Lankan captain to lose a home ODI series to a good for nothing England side. The need of the hour is for him to do a great deal of soul searching and figure out what went wrong with the team.

Instead, Jayawardene basically had an excuse for every problem in Australia. Without owning up to his failure, he tried to attribute it to various factors, He only stopped short of blaming the moon, sun and rain for Sri Lanka’s problems!

The media conference was also attended by SLC Chairman Arjuna Ranatunga, CEO Duleep Mendis and Head Coach Trevor Bayliss.

Ranatunga insisted on the need to have a national selection policy, which he said, would help the country to obviate shortcomings in selections. Speaking through experience, he urged the team to move on from the Commonwealth Bank Series and said teams tended to go through bad patches in places like Australia.