As a patriotic citizen, I must register my utter disgust at the way our national cricket team threw away the finals of the Twenty-20 at Lords. Much before cricket was popularized here in Sri Lanka, and much before we earned the Test-playing status, I have been a keen follower of cricket, and must confess now that never was I so embarassed about my country as at the recent finals. Winning and losing is part of the game, but then, there is a way to lose. The way we lost last Sunday was very humiliating and uncalled for, to say the least. To begin with, the Pakistani bowlers did not excel at all in the finals, but our batsman did the job on behalf of them, in the sense of throwing their wickets away. One just cannot even imagine how a team that was unbeaten all along could lose so disgracefully. The team did not give the impression that they were after all playing the Finals.

My main complaint is that in spite of continuous and more than obvious patches in our batting, the selectors never thought of any changes. What on earth both Chamara Silva and Jehan Mubarak were doing with regard to their batting, no one knows. Still worse was how the selectors took shelter behind a never proven axiom "a winning team should not be changed". All rounders like Maharouf and Indika de Saram were just passengers in the team, never being given a chance. To make matters worse, while Dilshan was making a valiant one-man rescue operation, in one of the best performances in this type of cricket, in that semi-final against the West Indies, our former captain had the audacity to appear for an interview and then comment leisurely about the batting collapse that day saying in his own inimitable accent "well, such collapses are part of this type of game, and Dilshan is batting well"! He seemed to be saying that the team had anticipated that Dilshan would be batting, and so, they threw away the wickets that day! If only our selectors had the basic common sense to evaluate conscientiously that semi-final, they would have concluded that if not for Dilshan's batting, we would have been eliminated from the tournament that very day itself. We never seem to have evaluations of our performances (especially on the part of the selectors) and so, we never seem to learn. If only our batting had some credible strengh, not just depending exclusively on one single man called Dilshan, the finals would have been ours. While paying credit to the captain Kumar Sangakkara for his very responsible innings in the Finals, one cannot nevertheless resist asking oneself how the consistent failures of most of our batsman, and those of Chamara Silva and Jehan Mubarak, were so gleefully condoned. There seems to be some mysterious rationale which none of us cricket lovers could fathom. But then, both the national team, and also the selectors need to remember that they are not a law unto themselves, but they do represent us in cricket as a nation, and so they need to be accountable and responsible to us, the Sri Lankan nation. Until and unless they do this, we can be well assured of a row of such humiliations in our most popular and noble sport, cricket.