Sanath Jayasuriya was back to his magical best last evening. The Mumbai Indians taking on Chennai Super Kings saw Sachin Tendulkar making his IPL début. The night however belonged to Jayasuriya.
At the start of the Mumbai Indian's batting inning the packed stadium could be heard chanting "Sachin...Sachin". Not more than 30 minutes later all one heard was "Sooriya..Sooriya" everyone was on their feet chanting our Sanna boy's name.
The video is available in two forms one via YouTube as a 10 minute highlights package and the other via Veoh an extended highlights package which includes the presentation and post match celebrations.
Ma' Roof's on fire! Farveez takes Shane Warne apart in an over which yielded 27 runs. Maharoof's first six was a one handed cut shot which sailed over long off for six..Don't believe me? Watch the video! Click to expand...
Watch on Youtube For a figure short and somewhat wider than the average cricketer, Sri Lanka's captain Arjuna Ranatunga cast a long shadow during the 1998-99 summer. Whether strolling his singles, commenting severely on Australian crowds, or wagging his finger at an umpire, he tested a host of assumptions about cricket behaviour. Did his militancy constitute, as Alec Stewart decided, "a disgrace"? Or was Arjuna Ranatungahe, in the words of no less an authority than Peter Roebuck, "a cricketer on beautiful provocations"?
Rather than addressing this question directly, it is perhaps more fruitful to ask two others. From where does Arjuna's intense competitiveness spring? And why does he arouse, especially among Australians such intense feelings?
It is not as if Ranatunga is a newcomer to the school of cricket combat. International cricket's longest-serving player, he has always been a fighter, often at the outset of his career in losing causes. Australia saw evidence of his resilience in their first two Tests against Sri Lanka, at Kandy in April 1983 and Perth in February 1988. Deteriorating pitches on both occasions favoured the team winning the toss, and in both cases the Australians made the most of these advantages in completing victories by more than an innings. But in both cases Ranatunga stood tall, making 90 and 92 in the former match, 55 and 45 in the latter, top score in three of the four innings.
Ranatunga also stood out in other on-field circumstances. Sri Lankan cricketers were renowned for their gentlemanly qualities. Asked about "sledging" on their 1981 tour of England, their assistant manager replied ingenuously: "Sludging? What is sludging?" Ranatunga soon discovered it, and was apt to return it. The story goes that on an occasion, Captain Ranjan Madugalle was being subjected to a fearsome assault, by ball and mouth from Imran Khan. Ranatunga told Madugalle to concentrate on his batting and began needling Imran so that the abusive focus shifted towards him, at which point Ranatunga issued Pakistan's skipper a typical challenge, "You have the ball. I have the bat. Let's see who wins." The incident gains sharpness from its cultural context, for it involves a reversal of traditional Sri Lankan hierarchy; it is a mallie (younger brother or junior) protecting an aiyya (elder brother). And it is not the only way in which Ranatunga represents an inversion of cultural form. Indeed, the roots of Ranatunga's feisty nature and streetwise cricketing style cannot be understood without attending to Sri Lanka's social and political background.
The higher echelons of Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) cricket in the three decades after 1945 were dominated by cricketers emerging from the elite denominational schools of Colombo and Kandy as well as the premier government school, Royal College. These were westernised, English-speaking men. They profited from the social clout attached to a fluency in English and a particular upper-class lifestyle. A few of them were not above adopting airs and looking down on the vernacular-speaking yakoes (wild rustics) and "sarong-johnnies" - to use Ceylonese English jargon. The power of the English language in this era is indicated by the fact that Sinhala speakers subject to its force referred to it in the 1960s as the kaduva, or sword.
The westernised elites, however, were under challenge. The electoral overturn of 1956 that brought to power the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, a centre-left coalition led by the Bandaranaikes, has even been referred to, in exaggerated terms, as "the revolution of 1956", because it was a groundswell of the underprivileged seeking a place in the sun. It was also an expression of linguistic nationalism among the Sinhalese and included an explicit hostility to the primacy of English. But the transformations in the political order took time to permeate the cricketing arena. It was not till the late 1960's and in 1970's that talented cricketers from Ananda, Nalanda and Mahinda began to challenge the primacy of the Royal Thomains et al. These were also the elite schools but had originated in the Buddhist revival of the late nineteenth century, and their schoolboys were Sinhala-speakers partial to the directions arising from the transformations of 1956. One can consider Bandula Warnapura's appointment as captain of Sri Lanka in 1979 as an approximate marker of the moment when products of these schools gained primacy in the highest levels of Lankan cricket. Ranatunga, therefore, represents the second and third generations of players from this background.
The Ranatunga family was in the vanguard of this social change. Arjuna's father was a politician within the SLFP. Democratic politics in Sri Lanka has, for many decades now, been punctuated by intimidation and violence. It is said that the Ranatunga home was vandalised and a car burnt on one occasion - presumably by local supporters of the United National Party. In brief, young Ranatunga is familiar with the hurly-burly of politics.
None of which is to say that Ranatunga is abrasive in demeanour at all times. Indeed, in common with the majority of his cricketing peers in the Sri Lankan teams in recent decades, his interpersonal style is characterised by a measure of shyness. On social occasions he is courteous and restrained. An English journalist expressed amazement at the ease and patience shown by Ranatunga during the official function for the cricketers in Adelaide recently. On countless occasions his fork-with-morsel of food was arrested on its journey so that he could respond to requests for autographs and pictures.
Two gestures on Ranatunga's part after Sri Lanka had won the World Cup in March 1996 display his instincts for healing. On returning to Sri Lanka he made a point of taking the trophy to the home of Srima Dissanayake, the widow of Gamini Dissanayake, a former President of the Board of Cricket for Sri Lanka, who had been instrumental in securing full Test status for Sri Lanka at the ICC in 1981. As UNP leader, Dissanayake had been assassinated by a suicide bomber in 1994 as he addressed an election rally during his presidential campaign. Party lines are firmly demarcated in Sri Lanka, and the son of an SLFP politician displaying such reverence to the memory of an ideological enemy was remarkable.
The second gesture was caught on camera immediately after the triumph at Lahore. Referring implicity to the victory over Australia, after encountering so much strife in that land a few months previously, Ranatunga was asked whether "revenge was sweet". With a broad smile Ranatunga replied, "I would not use those words." Few Sri Lankans would have been so magnanimous. Many would have thought the defeat of the Australians, whose umpires had so maltreated Muttiah Muralitharan, and who had declined to visit Sri Lanka during the Cup because of a perceived threat to their safety, could not have befallen nicer guys.
The Australians, by contrast, have not kept their thoughts innermost. Mark Taylor, Shane Warne, Ian Healy and Mark Waugh have been blunt in expressing their dislike for Ranatunga, and the Australian media has often published similar sentiments; long before, in fact the incidents at Adelaide Oval on January 1999 blotted Ranatunga's copybook further.
In doing so, however, they have probably revealed as much about themselves as about Ranatunga. Consider, for example, the criticism of Ranatunga's physique, and his style of walking some singles. This vexes Australians sorely. When Ranatunga was runout in a one dayer after the Australian tour, the television round up programme Sports Tonight made footage of his wicket, its "Play of the Day", its gleeful presenter gloating, "We enjoyed that." Yet when challenged about it while acting as guest commentator during an England-Sri Lanka match at the SCG Steve Waugh struggled to explain why Australians found Ranatunga's habit so annoying. Tony Greig raised the issue in non-confrontational style when Ranatunga was batting and asked, "Does it matter (that he walks)?" Waugh could not clarify how it did except to affirm that it was irritating.
The irritation arises, perhaps, not from the original habit, but in its continuance when Ranatunga knows how annoying it proves. He has even claimed that his walking/running is designed to manufacture overthrows. This seems a post-hoc rationalisation. I suspect that any study of videotapes from the 1980s would show Ranatunga walking his runs occasionally, especially in the tropics. It is, as Sunil Gavaskar would say, a means of conserving energy so as to bat the better.
Other elements of the Australian chorus against Ranatunga may arise from cultural misunderstanding. One ritual complaint has been that Ranatunga and his cricketers seldom fraternise at the end of a day's play by attending the traditional post-match drinks at which the rigours of the day are laid to one side.
But, speaking broadly, there is no bar culture in Sri Lanka. Though the Sinhala speaking players of the 1970s and after, did develop a familiarity with Western lifestyles in the course of their cricketing travels, most are ill at ease in pubs and bars. This discomfort is compounded for some by a lack of fluency in English. If they do imbibe alcohol, the Sri Lankan players prefer to do so in the cosy environment of verandahs or drawing rooms.
It is also possible that a degree of cultural misunderstanding was at work during the contretemps at Adelaide Oval when Muralitharan was no-balled.
Many Australians considered Ranatunga's finger-wagging to be deeply offensive. However, finger-wagging is commonplace in Sri Lanka as a form of emphasis. It is particulalry pronounced in political speeches, but can punctuate any debate.
Among Sri Lankans it is perhaps a more conscious tool when one is chastisng someone for an unethical transgression. Emerson, the umpire even in the opinion of non-partisan commentators such as Botham and Roebuck, was transgressing, grandstanding. There is no doubt that Ranatunga deemed Emerson's action to be a transgresion that called for chastisement. His responses, of course, also consituted a transgression. In the heat of the moment, however, the Sri Lankan cricketers were in an impossible position - whatever their response they were going to be losers.
Even without this plea in mitigation, one might also, in the righteous response from so many, detect a hint of double standards. Wasn't the last Test captain to remonstrate so forcefully with an umpire an Englishman, Mike Gatting, who brought a Faisalabad match to a standstill by assailing Pakistani Shakoor Rana? And how many Australian teams have moaned and bitched about umpiring across the subcontinent? Perhaps there is the taproot of the antipathy that western cricketers, media representatives and spectators feel for Ranatunga; the way he demonstrates that what's good for the goose is also good for the gander. Michael Roberts is on a quick trip to Sri Lanka, Tita Nathanielsz was able to persuade him to release this interesting article. We also acknowledge the courtesy extended by The Wisden Cricketers' Alamanack, Australia.
A fine knock by the Lankan skipper who proved a point to these self proclaimed purists who have written of 20Twenty Cricket as a slog-fest. Click to expand...
Cricinfo: SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates, 7th APR 1997 - Aravinda De Silva struck a brilliant 134 off 131 balls to give world champions Sri Lanka a 51-run victory over Pakistan in the Singer Akai Cup here on Monday - and earned them a place in Friday's final.
The classy 31-year-old, who fell three short of his first Sharjah hundred against Pakistan on Friday, smashed four sixes and 11 boundaries after coming in at 11 for two in the sixth over.
De Silva's eighth one-day hundred lifted Sri Lanka to an imposing 251 for seven.
TM Dilshan with an aggressive half century. This tour was one of Tom Moody's first assignments as Sri Lankan coach and the Lankans lost this series to the Indians 6-1. Click to expand...
Colombo, May 1 (PTI) Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) has sacked its media manager Samantha Algama after an interim committee meeting here.
"I have been sacked by Arjuna Ranatunga for being friendly and too good to the media. I have worked with dedication for three years as the honourable Media manager and spokesman," a fuming Algama told PTI after being removed from his job.
He was informed of the decision by a senior official of the SLC last night.
"I have been rated as one of the longest serving media managers in the cricketing world was doing a honorary job from 2005 without taking any salary from the SLC", Algama said.
Justifying the Algama's removal, SLC chief Arjuna Ranatunga said, "It was a decision of the interim committee. I will issue a press statement soon." The former Sri Lankan Cricket captain was appointed interim committee chairman of the SLC in January by President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
In his interaction with PTI earlier, Ranatunga had said he wanted to tap new cricketing talent and would be traveling to the hinterland of the country for the purpose.
He has already roped in cricket great Arvind de silva for training the junior cricketers.
Ranatunga, who had captained Sri Lanka in 38 Tests between 1988 and 1999, and played 269 one-day internationals, is currently a Member of Parliament representing the ruling United People's Freedom Alliance (UFPA) as the Colombo district member of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party.Click to expand...
Inspired by Sanath Jayasuriya's 3 for 14, the best figures of the tournament, the Mumbai Indians put their off-field troubles aside and pulled off their first win. Writes Siddarth Ravindran for Cricinfo.
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Daily Mirror: Wesley College has sacked its junior cricket coach following complaints received from parents that their budding cricketer sons were allegedly being misguided, the Daily Mirror learns.
The Daily Mirror learns that the Cricket Development Council of the Old Boys Union of Wesley College held an inquiry following the complaints and found that the allegations were substantiated by the parents of players.
School authorities preferred to withhold the name of the controversial coach but the Daily Mirror learns had he (coach) submitted his resignation after realising his services were to be terminated.
An official of the Wesley College Cricket Development Council, who wanted to remain anonymous for sensitive reasons told the Daily Mirror that distinguished old boys of the school were also keen to maintain the dignity and name of the school and were unanimous in their decision to do away with the junior coach.
“Anybody can approach us and discuss what is happening at the College. If we find any member of the staff or students conducting themselves in an uncalled for manner we will recommend stern action. We want to maintain credibility of the College,” he declared.
He alleged that the coach had behaved in a manner unbecoming of what was expected of him.
The Daily Mirror learns that the sacked coach also harboured differences with two other top notch coaches attached to the school’s senior team which was also taken into account when the decision to sack him was made.
Wesley’s sacking of its junior coach marks probably the first time in recent years that a coach has been sacked from his job.
The Daily Mirror understands that several junior coaches especially in Colombo and the suburbs are exploiting their positions for vested interests and continue unchecked.
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Cricinfo: Watching Sri Lanka's Ajantha Mendis bowl is like trying to hold a conversation with a naturally quiet person in a noisy pub. What was that again, Ajantha? Didn't quite catch that - can you repeat it? Sorry pal, I thought you said something else. Hey, can we go outside? Can't hear myself think in here.
Mendis's run-up is plain to the point of innocence, but his fingers are all subtlety, inscrutably resistant to sharing their secrets. The batsman is left groping, searching for cues and clues. Eh? Come again? What was that? Can you give me that once more? And finally: what happened?
His mixture of legbreaks, offbreaks, doosras, googlies and topspinners is a perplexity for statisticians too. Cricinfo is calling him "right-arm slow-medium" at the moment, but cricketers translate "right-arm slow-medium" as "bowls in the nets if he's lucky". If he plays county cricket, Playfair will have to consider a designation like ROBLB or RSM@#&%?!
Others have already settled on the designation "mystery spinner", the epithet conferred almost 60 years ago on the Australian Jack Iverson. Mendis and he certainly seem to share prodigiously strong middle fingers. The ball settled into Iverson's grip like a marble for the squirting. Mendis, likewise, looks simply to caress the ball as he propels it, barely involving the palm of his hand at all, and holding one particular variation as delicately as an entomological specimen. Both bowlers possess the cardinal virtue of accuracy, and a liking for long spells.
Where they differ seems to be in variety and spin. Iverson spun his stock ball, a googly, massively, but his variations considerably less: batsmen finally figured on playing him as an offbreak bowler, albeit one who looked like he was bowling legbreaks. Mendis doesn't spin any of his options enormously; it is the combination of them, and the difficulty distinguishing one from the other, that makes him a handful.
There is always excitement when a bowler like Mendis appears. Batsmen scratch their heads. Captains and coaches confabulate. Cricket's telephone exchange buzzes.
The original "mystery ball", and still perhaps the most delicious, is the googly itself, the offbreak delivered by the legbreak action conceived on his family billiards table before being hazarded on the sward at Lord's by BJT Bosanquet - and thus sometimes known as the "bosie", and also the "wrong 'un". It's somehow fitting that such a double agent of a delivery should have multiple aliases.
At first the googly posed more preposterous difficulties than its progenitor: the first to take a first-class wicket bounced four times. But it soon swept the world: the South African XI of a century ago included no fewer than four specialist purveyors, and the Australian team of 1910-11 featured perhaps the best exponent of all. Certainly it was the view of Johnnie Moyes, who saw all its antipodean advocates, Arthur Mailey, Clarrie Grimmett and Bill O'Reilly included, that no Australian mastered the googly more thoroughly than "Ranji" Hordern.
[Hordern] was without doubt an amazing bowler. He took a long run, brought his arm right over, was a length as well as a spin bowler, and of medium pace. He didn't seem to be flighting the ball, yet did so, as the batsman discovered when he tried to move down the pitch to him. That wasn't easy as Hordern was slightly faster through the air, but the temptation was there, as I found to my cost in Victor Trumper's benefit game, only to hear Sammy Carter say, "Got you, son"... Sometimes you could see the tip of the little finger sticking up skyward like a periscope of a submarine, but only if you were concentrating on it. If you did see it, you recognised the approaching "bosie".
The first googly in Australia bowled Victor Trumper; a googly was also the last ball to defeat Donald Bradman in a Test match. Simply by existing, it had an effect on cricket's ecosystem. "If this sort of bowling becomes general I'm packing my bags," threatened Archie MacLaren, before deciding he could live with it. It even enjoyed an oriental translation into the "chinaman".
No other delivery, in fact, has had quite the same impact on cricket, and by never really being improved on, it also caused cricket to revert to being a batsman's game. In an incisive 1950 critique of Bradman's impact on cricket, the Birmingham Post's cricket correspondent WE Hall observed.
In due course we shall come to see Bradman as an inevitable part of the evolution of the game. From Grace's integration of forward and back-play the art of batting advanced until, in [Jack] Hobbs, a technique was perfected to master the "new" bowling, as it has been called. It was the last of the qualitative changes in cricket, a fact realised by one writer who said that the game needed a new type of ball to do what the "googly" once did. But there has been no new type of ball, and the only development left to batsmen between the wars was the quantitative one which followed, as surely as mass production followed the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Of course, mystery bowling is classically an individual pursuit, the result of lone experiment and lateral thought. Iverson is the archetype, his bowling having originated in a lifetime of nervous finger flicking with a table tennis ball; likewise were Iverson's protégé Johnny Gleeson, double-dealing Sonny Ramadhin, and whizz-banging Bhagwat Chandrasekhar self-taught cricketers.
Ramadhin and Chandra made the most of their bowling's hidden depths. Delivering a stock ball that spun from the off, both buttoned their sleeves at the wrist, as though to deflect the curious glare. Ramadhin bowled his offbreak with the middle finger down rather than across the seam, to sometimes startling effect. Ken Archer described playing with Ramadhin for a Commonwealth XI in September 1954 at seaside Hastings, when the bowler discovered that his quicker one seamed away with an ounce of extra effort; he could hardly bowl for his delighted laughter. Chandra's right arm was so withered from childhood polio that he could hardly hold a cup of tea to his lips. But with it he bowled googlies and legbreaks that seemed to set his whole body whirring like a child's spinning top. And like no other bowler, he haunted Viv Richards.
The party started at around 1.00 am. This is the list of all the players who attended.... Yuvraj Singh, Sreesanth, Darren Lehman, Kaif, Shane Warne, Shane Watson, Sangakkara, Munaf Patel, Aamir Sohail, both Pathans.
The video you are seeing is Brett Lee after 5 hours of starting an impromptu concert. All the guys were so good when taking pictures of them. - Courtesy pasla27 Click to expand...
The most consistent display of class and grace came earlier in the day, from Sangakkara. Though he missed getting a hundred, Sangakkara managed to overtake Brendon McCullum as the tournament's leading run-scorer - and he did it in style.
For his first scoring shot, a drive through extra-cover for four, he transferred his weight perfectly from back to front foot and then arrested his follow-through halfway through the shot. Out of place in such a setting, perhaps, but no one was complaining.
He used his wrists to great effect; to reach his fifty - off 23 balls - with a cut-glide to point and to flick to fine leg. - Cricinfo
The Island: The International Cricket Council on Wednesday announced that Asoka de Silva of and Australian Steve Davis had been promoted to the Emirates Elite Panel of ICC Umpires, with the pool of top officials expanding from 10 to 12.
The two umpires, who have been serving on the Emirates International Panel of ICC Umpires, have been elevated to the Elite Panel by the ICC Umpires Selection Panel made up of David Richardson, ICC’s General Manager – Cricket, Emirates Elite Panel ICC Chief Match Referee Ranjan Madugalle, ex-England player, coach and former first-class umpire David Lloyd and Srinivasaraghavan Venkataraghavan, the former India captain and international umpire. Click to expand...
Cricinfo: Lancashire deserved their success, which earned the club and the players #35,000, a gold trophy and, every bit as important, the satisfaction and relief of winning. For those outside the Du- chy, however, it was de Silva`s oriental genius - coming from east of the Medway he is presumably a man of Kent - which made the day memorable.
Bold, quick-footed and hitting the ball immensely hard for so small a man on his way to 112 off 95 balls, only the third hundred in the July final, he upstaged even Mike Atherton and John Crawley, whose innings earlier in the day had set the standard of quality.
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