Sri Lanka Cricket and its IPL players

dcsiva — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:02:00 GMT

Sri Lanka Cricket and its players are still battling with one another. The brief summary: SLC granted permission to contract with the IPL teams next year; the ECB pulled out of their invitation to Zimbabwe to tour to England; SLC signed up to tour to England instead; and SLC now want their top players to go to England instead of playing for the IPL. The Daily News says the players are reluctant to meet the SLC:

The Minister of Sports and Recreation Gamini Lokuge yesterday appointed Duleep Mendis Chief Executive Officer of Sri Lanka Cricket to mediate and resolve the crisis between the SLC Interim Committee and the players who have signed to play in next year’s Indian Premier League Twenty20 tournament.

The second session of the high profile Indian Premier League Twenty20 tournament will clash with Sri Lanka’s tour to England next year and the Minister was expected to deliver the final verdict following a discussion with both parties.

However the Minister was forced to delay the final decision as the players had informed their inability to attend the meeting. As a result Duleep Mendis former Sri Lanka captain and the Chief Executive Officer of the SLC took over the responsibilities of finding a solution for this issue.

The Daily Mirror writes that the players---Jayawardene, Muralitharan, and Jayasuriya, among others---are considering retirement:

SLC sources said that the cricketers had refused to budge and had warned that they are ready to take even extreme measures such as contemplating retirement from national team to honour the IPL contracts they have already signed, if they have no other choice. They have reportedly pointed out that the England tour was hastily arranged later by SLC officials without consulting the cricketers who were under IPL contracts.

The future of cricket will be about a combination of city based Twenty20 cricket and the occasinoal game of Test cricket. This is probably a good thing.

Moneyed batting and philosophical cricket

dcsiva — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:57:00 GMT

Sanath Jayasuriya strikes again. Ottayan reports that Kevin Pietersen will sign up for next year's IPL for as much as 2 million pounds! The article Ottayan linked to suggests:

An ECB insider told Sportsmail that the final decision on all centrally-contracted players heading for the IPL will be in the hands of England coach Peter Moores but that, in Pietersen's case, they will not stand in his way.
That means the Hampshire batsman is likely to head to India virtually as soon as England return from their tour of the West Indies at the start of next April and play in the IPL for three weeks to a month before returning to prepare for the World Twenty20 tournament in England. After that will be the small matter of the Ashes.

And why would Pietersen be such a special case? The New York Times carries on its fascination with cricket in New York, writing about a novelist who in turn has written about cricket:

He has clung to cricket, he said recently, because it’s his “athletic mother tongue,” and to learn baseball, say, would be like taking up a foreign language. Even if he became proficient, he wouldn’t get the jokes or the poetry.
...
Mr. O’Neill’s new book, “Netherland” (Pantheon), identifies the Staten Island Cricket Club by name, though not any of its players, and there’s a long description of Walker Park, the club’s home ground since 1876, a bumpy, crabgrass-ridden expanse just a block from the Kill Van Kull. It’s bordered now by tennis courts, a baseball field, a children’s playground and, beyond a chain-link fence, some Victorian houses that are occasionally bombarded by cricket balls, little red meteors crashing through front windows or cratering into flower beds.

Finally, Samir Chopra calls for all and any philosophical treatises on cricket.

Cover Points : Sanath Jayasuriya

Sri Lanka Cricket and its IPL players

Moneyed batting and philosophical cricket