High time Sri Lanka began building for next World Cup, says Mendis (30 May 1999)

30 May 1999

High time Sri Lanka began building for next World Cup, says Mendis

Sa'adi Thawfeeq

SOUTHAMPTON, May 29 - Manager Duleep Mendis said that it was high time that Sri Lanka began building a team for the next World Cup.

Cricket's eighth World Cup is scheduled to be held in South Africa in 2003, and Mendis who is also the chairman of selectors said: "We reached the summit in one-day cricket when we won the World Cup three years ago. Having attained that position the only way you can go further is to come down".

Since winning the World Cup, Sri Lanka maintained the high standards for over two years until last October at Dhaka when the team started to fall apart which eventually led to them being knocked out in the first round of the '99 World Cup.

From Dhaka, Sri Lanka have participated in five one-day tournaments and failed to qualify for the final in any of them. Their one-day record from Dhaka to England tells the sad story - six wins and 18 losses out of 24 matches going into the final World Cup Group 'A' match against Kenya here tomorrow.

Mendis admitted that Sri Lanka made a late start in forming the composition of their team for the World Cup and said the motivatation was not there for some of the players to go any further.

"You can't do changes in two or three months. We must give the youngsters a fair chance to prove themselves. It is time we brought some of them in," he said.

Mendis said the team had performed very badly and they would have to face the critics without trying to argue and make vague excuses.

"The players are feeling very bad, especially the batsmen. They themselves realise that they have let the side down. If we analyse our matches, it has been the batting that has let us down. It has been a failure right throughout the tournament and you can't expect to win and qualify when you bat like that," said Mendis.

"Despite coming as early as April to get ourselves acclimatised to the pitches and the conditions, our batsmen couldn't come to terms with the moving ball. It is as simple as that," he said.

"We had the most experienced batting line-up in the competition with the first seven batsmen all having scored one-day hundreds, but they still failed. The reason I think is that either they get excited or they lose their concentration in the middle. The batsmen contributed to their own dismissals. Batting is something the individual has to improve on his own unlike in bowling and fielding," said Mendis.

"There has been a vast improvement in the bowling and fielding, except for the last game (against India) when we mucked it up our chances," he said.

"Our target of chasing 374 was out. Our next target was 280 which we also couldn't achieve. Getting to 280 would have minimised the target we would have had to get against Kenya," said Mendis.

The task for Sri Lanka seems a virtually impossible one having to first get out of the minus deficit to start thinking of getting anywhere nearer India's superios net run rate. The team requested a practice session for the afternoon to keep a close tab on the India-England and Zimbabwe-South Africa games (played today), the results of which would determine Sri Lanka's fate in the competition.

Sri Lanka are likely to make one change for their game against Kenya starting here tomorrow. Knowing Kenya's weakness against spin, they are likely to include leg-spinner Upul Chandana ahead of Erik Upashantha who had a poor game against India. They will know exactly how much they should score to qualify depending on the results of the other two group matches played today. Sri Lanka are fourth in the group with only two points, their solitary win coming against Zimbabwe.

Kenya who have lost all their matches in the group are fancing their chances of beating Sri Lanka.

Kenyan manager Harilal Shah said: "We think we have a chance against Sri Lanka. After all our margins of defeat against England and India were no worse than theirs".

"Our shortcoming has been the bowling. We don't have the bowling to exploit the conditions. Our batting has been consistent topping 200 runs in every game barring the one against South Africa. We would like to finish the tournament with a win," said Kenya captain Asif Karim.

"We are going in with a positive frame of mind. We would like to win it for two reasons. We have tried hard to win every game, and this being the last game against the world champions who are unfortunately struggling, we have nothing to lose," said Karim.

"Sri Lanka are in a tough situation right now to qualify. Even if they try score runs off us we are not duly worried. All what we are worried about is what our strengths are," he said.

Sri Lanka (from): Arjuna Ranatunga (captain), Sanath Jayasuriya, Roshan Mahanama, Marvan Atapattu, Aravinda de Silva, Mahela Jayawardene, Romesh Kaluwitharana, Chaminda Vaas, Pramodya Wickremasinghe, Muthiah Muralitharan, Upul Chandana, Erik Upashantha.

Kenya (from): Asif Karim (captain), Kennedy Otieno, Ravindu Shah, Sandip Gupta, Steve Tikolo, Maurice Odumbe, Alpesh Vadher, Thomas Odoyo, Mohamed Sheikh, Martin Suji, Joseph Angara, Hitesh Modi.

Umpires: Peter Willey (England) and David Orchard (South Africa),
TV umpire: Barry Dudleston, Match Referee: Talat Ali (Pakistan).

Source :: The Daily News