Quote:This concept is not new. It was first introduced in 2004 by Aravinda when he was a Vice-President of Sri Lanka Cricket.
“Seventeen years later, we are going back to what I started then,” he said, in an interview with the Sunday Times. “It’s never too late to get this moving. This provincial system will provide a good pathway for talented cricketers to climb the ladder and join the national team.”
“We need to protect the club structure as it gives opportunities for cricketers to play in domestic leagues in other countries,” he explained. “But our primary focus will be the provincial structure. If you take the club tournament, we have about 520 players spread across 26 clubs. This has diluted the competitiveness of the tournament. But in the provincial structure, we are talking about 100 players. The quality and competitiveness of the tournament will be much higher.”
Quote:Reviving the high performance centre and its existing human resources is another area Aravinda and his committee are giving attention to. It plays a key role in meeting the holistic needs of players who want to take their game into the professional realm.
“We have a structure in place already,” Aravinda said. “But we need to re-evaluate it, including the people working there, to identify their strengths and weakness. We are not looking to chase anyone out but when we know their strengths and weakness, it’s easy to work.”
“You need to understand that, even if you had played 100 Tests, when you wear the coach’s hat, you have to start all over again,” he explained. “Coaching is about commitment, passion and working with people. When you wear that hat, you need to forget about being a cricketer and become a teacher and a guardian. This is the philosophy we need to work on.”
Jerome Jayaratne currently heads the high performance centre based at Khettarama. He is now directly under the supervision of Tom Moody who is expected to review and make changes to make the centre impactful.
“Building human resources is the most important thing and we will propose to allocate a substantial budgetary allocation to develop coaches, administrators, curators, umpires, physios, data analysts, etc,” Aravinda said. By doing so, Sri Lanka could cut their over-reliance on foreign experts.
“One of the aspects of hiring Moody is to develop our support staff and to stop our dependency on foreign staff in the future,” he said. “This process has broken down every time. We have asked him to develop a team of coaches who would be able to assume some of the top positions within the national team. We won’t be able to take over some of those specialized areas which demand specialized knowledge and qualifications, but we will try and give as much responsibility to local coaches on performance.”
Quote:They will also propose a new payment structure that will allow full-time involvement even at club level.
“Our proposal is for the Board to allocate a substantial amount for the development of this domestic structure,” Aravinda added. “If you take a cricketer who is playing in England, he earns about Rs 1 to 1.5 million for a season and they will earn a similar amount by playing cricket in Australia. If we can pay a similar amount for our club cricketer, I think it’s a decent pay. But at the provincial level, we will have a higher salary bracket. This is my thinking but we will have to do some research to see what the budgets are and work on some realistic schemes.”
Aravinda is also focusing on maintaining a high level of discipline across all levels – players, administrators, coaches, selectors, etc.
“I think we need to instil discipline and get these cricketers to be only focused on cricket,” he said, when asked why Sri Lanka continues to struggle across all formats. “There cannot be compromises. We need to be very firm with what they want to do. All they need to do is go out and play.”
For this, he says, the Board needs a strong administration that respects and values the principles of good governance–transparency and accountability–traits that are not even remotely connected with those running the place in recent years. “We need to create that environment where players could perform without any interference and administrators run the Board without any issue,” he insists.
“Of course, nothing runs 100 percent smoothly,” Aravinda admitted. “There are some hard decisions to be made and we have to make those. I think once we put those things in place, and when they know there are no compromises, players will realise that there’s no other way than performing. It doesn’t matter what your seniority in the side is or whether you are the captain. We need to take tough action if they don’t fall in line. If we can do this over a period of time with fair treatment for everyone, I think things can change.”
In recent years, there have been issues of misconduct and reports of player rifts are common. Aravinda says these must be stopped and for one goal to be supported. He is advocating equal treatment for all regardless of status in the team. Clauses will be brought in to discourage individualism.
“We want to treat everyone equally,” he reiterated. “There won’t be any special payments for individual performance as we are not encouraging personal glory. However, we will give them match bonuses. For instance, if they win a game against a top-ranked team, the match bonus will be higher than when they win against teams ranked lower than them.”
The former World Cup-winning cricketer also stressed the importance of Test cricket and said more weightage will be given to this when preparing new annual contracts.
“It demands a lot from a cricketer over five-day period and we will give higher weightage for Test cricket when preparing contracts,” he explained. “For instance, so many T20 matches will be equal to one Test match. So many ODI matches will be equal to one Test match.”
Aravinda and his team are burning the midnight oil to release this blueprint as soon as possible. They have hired Tom Moody, who has worked in different cricketing set-ups, to assist them. Once the structure is in place, Aravinda hopes everything will fall in line.
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/210411/sports/aravindas-mantra-to-reform-sri-lankas-cricket-structure-439564.html
