Sports

The season for horse-trading and back-stabbing in local cricket is at peak point. Both camps in the fray are using all their ammunition at hand to get even an inch of advantage over the other. For instance one camp who sought the support of the so-called southern puppeteer now have stumbled upon a legal snag while the other who opted to get the support of a political TV chat-show idol is also facing some obstacles because the former have also come into some lie-low pressure from his own party peers. Now the latter party has reverted to their old faithful to come forward as the figure-head. Nevertheless with only a few days left for nominations all these trench-digging and bunker-building is sure to continue.

In support of my argument here is a tiny bit of a story.
Once upon a time, a politician, a cricket administrator and an umpire were off on a long journey. Despite having travelled far they could not reach their desired destination as it was now daybreak and the three eminent personalities were forced to take refuge in a little farmer’s shack in the middle of nowhere.

Ironically there was a little snag. In spite of all the hospitality the former could offer only one little room just enough for two and the other had to sleep in his ‘pigsty’. So automatically the more influential cricket administrator and the politician squeezed themselves into the tiny bed that was there leaving their friend, the umpire, to sleep with the pigs.

It was a while before the two sleeping peers heard a banging on the door. The umpire had come to the end of his tether. He cried that he could not stand the stench anymore and pleaded for help. Like good friends always do, the two peers offered the bed to the umpire and opted to sleep in the sty.

The next morning the umpire woke up hearing an angry farmer bellowing. He shouted “You have abused my hospitality and please don’t step into my farm again, see your two friends are still sleeping, but before they slept they have eaten all of what the pigs eat and they are left with nothing now”. The dumb-found umpire just stared at his two friends enjoying the heavenly bliss of the pigsty.

Fortunately away in England sanity has prevailed and the Lankan team is doing well with a neat blend of youth and experience. It’s nice to see that the tour administrators are carrying forward the trend they started with the third test at Trent Bridge. Indeed a good omen for Sri Lanka cricket.

Finally in cricket it is heartening to note that a group of past Sri Lanka cricketers have taken serious note of the parlous state of the present cricket administration and are genuinely interested in helping out. This timely step taken by them should be hailed. I fervently hope that something good will come out from this latest twist.

SAF Games still in tangles

However every sport in this country is not as lucid as Sri Lankan cricket. By the way, in a little more than a month Sri Lanka is billed to host one of its biggest sporting spectacles in decades, when they play host to the South Asian Federation Games. However according to insiders everything is not hunky-dory as it seems to be.

They say that the Sri Lanka athletic team that is eyeing over fifteen gold medals may get only about five, but hope the doomsday soothsayer will be proved wrong and Sri Lanka will enjoy the same success that they enjoyed when they hosted it way back in 1991.

It was only last week that we carried a column on the plight of the Lankan rowers who have come upon huge stumbling blocks with the lack of equipment. The medal winning rowers at the last SAF games in Pakistan are not at all happy this time and are not sure if they would stand to win any this time in their own waters under the present circumstances. Well….for a feature which was originally scheduled to be staged more than a year ago it’s just bad show. One can call it being ‘bloody’ unprofessional.

At the same time last week at the Junior Athletics Nationals the data entry system was another big mess and prompted the journalists who were there to get the results in time for publication to ask whether this is what they were hoping to dish-out at the SAF games?

However according the AAA Vice president Sunil Jayaweera who is now heavily involved with the infrastructure preparations for the SAF games, at present everything is falling into its correct positions. By the 20th of July the city of Colombo will be ready to host the 2005 SAF games in August 2006. However as Jayaweera who was one of the main cogs-in-the-wheel at the 1991 Colombo games which was a very successful one is still with us, may be that we can have some hope of a proper show.