Lankan cricket at a crossroads: Sidath Wettimuny

COLOMBO: In his prime, Sidath Wettimuny was a tough-as-a-nut opening batsman for Sri Lanka. He was compact in his technique and determined in his ways. There cannot be a better man to guide Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) from the vicious circle of debt that the board finds itself in.
The stadium debt was pegged to be around $20 million earlier this year when the new interim committee to run SLC took over.Wettimuny and his team was appointed by Sri Lankan sports minister Navin Dissanayake to run SLC in April. The move hasn't gone down well with the International Cricket Council (ICC), which has given the interim committee time till Jan 26 next year to hold free and fair elections to elect board members.
In the meantime, it's up to Wettimuny and Co. to guide the Lankan team through this period of transition. "We are at a crossroads. We have lost (Mahela) Jayawardene and now (Kumar) Sangakkara and earlier (Muttiah) Muralitharan and then Chaminda Vaas — one of the true unsung heroes of Lankan cricket," Wettimuny told TOI.
"We have got some really good talent and before long you'll find them coming into this main team. Maybe you'll see them later in the series but definitely by the time you come to the West Indies tour, you will see a more settled unit. The selectors needed to take stock and slowly make the changes," he added.
Wettimuny, who celebrated his 59th birthday on first day of the first Test in Galle, said the SLC was now in a much better situation financially. "There was a lot of concern about financial status of the board when I took over. We have tightened our belt a lot and things are a lot more comfortable now."
Some of the top Lankan players, like Sangakkara, have raised concerns about the development of the game in the country. "I am also concerned about domestic cricket. Earlier we had a province-based structure but now we are looking at franchise model, even for first-class cricket. We will have a system with the five best teams.
"We need to play on good wickets —because of too much cricket we are not preparing good wickets consistently. Mahela gave me a statistic comparing SL, India and couple of other countries. It was shocking that the runs scored in our domestic cricket is much lower than other countries and even the number of overs bowled too was alarmingly low. We need to play better cricket on better wickets," Wettimuny, who was the first Lankan to score a century at Lord's in 1982, said.
Sri Lanka will be defending their World T20 crown that they won in 2014 in less than a year's time in India and have started preparing in earnest for it. "We don't have a lot of time, so we have to maximize on what we have."
Wettimuny is trying to rope in help from some of the former Lankan and international cricketers for the development of the game in this country. "Jeffrey Vandersay is one of our brightest prospects. A good leg-spinner is like gold. We want to expose him to some like Shane Warne to get some guidance. Asanka Gurusinha has flown down from Australia recently and he will be working with some of our under-19 cricketers. We are also looking at Wasim Akram and Jonty Rhodes spending about 10 days each with our cricketers," the interim committee chairman said.