Sri Lanka has not had a settled batting order for almost two years and this has proved detrimental to the team’s instability at international level where the word CONSISTENCY has simply disappeared.With the World Cup barely seven months away Sri Lanka has yet not got their composition of the side right.
One has only to look at the eleven picked for the first ODI against England at Dambulla where they named only five specialist batsmen of which one of them was the wicket-keeper, knowing very well that our weakness lay in our batting. Thankfully the game did not go the full distance as rain allowed only 15 overs.
The head coach who is also a selector went to great pains to explain the dropping of Angelo Mathews by revealing stats on the number of times he has been run out and how bad a runner he was between wickets. One wonders whether he has looked into how many occasions Sri Lanka has failed to bat out the full quota of 50 overs.Since January 2017 Sri Lanka has played 41 ODIs and lost 30 of them and failed to bat out the 50 overs on 22 occasions. Don’t those figures tell you where are weakness lies?
Sri Lanka’s bane is their batting which has been rather inconsistent, so instead of trying to rectify and strengthen the weakness we are still persisting with this combination of playing only five specialist batsmen – that too without the experienced Mathews and the exceptionally talented Kusal Mendis - and overloading the side with all-rounders instead of going for a 7-4 combination of seven batsmen and four bowlers that has proved to be our success over the years.