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Making junior cricket more effectiveBollywood had got it right from time immemorial. They knew the ingredients that a film needed and what people wanted to make a cash collection for themselves. They had their hero, heroine, the villain, the clownish fool, the love affair, the separation, the fights, the thirteen songs and the reunion of the lovers who live happily ever after.

But, here in Sri Lanka talking of cricket it always had to be a ‘minus’ affair where we always discussed about a doomsday future, especially when it came to the feeder points to our national grid.

This has been said before, but to continue with this subject this part of the story has to be included like one of the Bollywood stories. In the good old days when Sri Lankan cricket was purely an amateur affair in spite of the depth of talent available. Under that scenario the status quo remained very effective. There were 2-3 schools that were recognised as good cricket playing schools and 2-3 clubs that formed that nucleus to the national grid, but the passion rolled on and it must be mentioned there was talent in those teams. Selecting a national squad was an easy task whenever the need arose. Just walk down to the fence of your club and look who is available from the guys next door and form your team.Authorities should take a closer look at the present school cricket structure.Things began to change in the late sixties especially when the Sri Lanka schoolboy team comprising the likes of Bandula Warnapura, Duleep Mendis, Roy Dias, Ajith de Silva and Lalith Kaluperuma made a very successful tour of India. That was a huge turning point for the game of cricket in Sri Lanka. The 2-3 school shackle had been broken. For this tour cricketers were chosen from a cross section of schools around the island, and this particular team indeed really formed the nucleus of the team that played Sri Lanka’s inaugural Test in 1982. Nevertheless, even this opening was not sufficient to harness the entire cricketing talent of this country.

However with the 1996 World Cup win the seams broke loose. Interest in school cricket took to the roots of the country and gradually the accent of talent bent towards the outstations and the ‘big city’ input began to wean and at the same time ‘out-of-the-box’ cricketers in the calibre of Lasith Malinga, Ajantha Mendis and along with them some cricketers who had missed the initial bus while playing for schools – like Suranga Lakmal, Isuru Udana, began to make it direct to the national grid from the club circuit.Just to get a glimpse of this scenario and how healthy it is to our system we sought the views of a cricket insider who preferred to remain anonymous, but share his vast knowledge with us. He with his allround experience as a player, selector and coach explained how this machine works and earnestly how it should work.

He put a load of emphasis on coaching mainly during the pre-under fifteen stage. He said “That is the time that they learn to play the game. At that time they are flexible and they have the room in their system to absorb. However by the time you reach the under 15 stage, the model is almost cast and from that point onwards it is very difficult to change your basic approach to the game like how you grip the bat and whether you are side-on or open chest when you bowl.

“There is another very important fact that must be observed. If a batsman has a different grip or is a bit bottom heavy, and is still effective in run scoring you must NOT mess around with that. That is a gifted skill. For instance Sanath Jayasuriya is a bottom heavy player while Aravinda de Silva used to change his grip for various shots that he played. But, both these batsmen have created their own little niche in the history of cricket.”

Then explaining about bowling he mused “If Lasith Malinga attended practices in one of these so called big city schools with a ‘five star’ coach, I am sure he would not have played even under 14 cricket. The coach would have scoffed at his round arm action and would have dismissed him with a canny remark…..”Are you trying to take off the umpires’ ear?” But, it was former Sri Lanka bowling coach Champaka Ramanayake who discovered Malinga off a soft ball course and nurtured him on to bigger deeds. That is because by then he had learned the bigger picture in cricket and knew how to spot talent that works. In short the ten or twelve fast bowlers who are rotating in the higher echelons of Sri Lanka cricket besides Vaas are products of the Rumesh Ratnayake-Champaka Ramanayake combination. Champaka’s exit was a huge loss for Sri Lanka cricket”.

He is also of the view that the talent searches around the island done by private conglomerates are very effective that the net that it has cast goes into every nook and cranny of cricket in the island and adds “Now it is very difficult for the system to miss cricketers like Suranga Lakmal from Debarawewa or Isuru Udana from Balangoda even if they miss a chance to enter a big city school to end their basic careers.”
At the same time he sees a basic flaw in that system that would grow to be a huge draw back if the authorities let it go unheeded. He explained “When we were young we played the game till we were under 20. So when we finished our school careers we were almost mature cricketers.

Now the authorities have cut the age limit to under 19 and it is bad. For instance one does his exams at the age of seventeen. As a result he limits his involvement in cricket at the age of sixteen and for two years he has very little or no cricket at all. Then if it is under 19 he only has one more year of cricket in school and that is not sufficient to make an effective come-back. If it was twenty he has two years and in his last year he really can concentrate in his game and be very effective, I know because I played school cricket till I was twenty and in my last year I scored over nine hundred runs in about ten matches. There were so many others at that time who did that during my time.”

Explaining further he reiterated “The first tournament of the SLC is the under 23 tournament. When you leave school cricket at the age of 19 there is a four year gap and inevitably some talented cricketers go in search of other pastures as result of the time gap. At the age of twenty the impact is far less.”

So these are some of the pros and cons that modern Sri Lankan feeder points face and if they need a Bollywood type finish to our cricket the best thing is go to the roots and take remedial measures.