Lankans looking to salvage pride

Ranjan Anandappa in Australia

Sri Lanka will make their final appearance in the Commonwealth Bank Tri Nation cricket series. When they meet Australia in the 12th match of the series with little or no significance in a day\night game at the Melbourne Cricket grounds today.

After being eliminated in the running of the final, a win against Australia today would salvage some pride to the Islanders.

The Aussies who take every match seriously will no doubt try to block Sri Lanka from achieving that goal.

The composition of both teams are still unknown and both teams might opt to field some fringe players in this game is only of an academic interest.

Sri Lanka skipper Mahela Jayawardena in a post match press briefing soon after the defeat, at the hands of India in Hobart said that the standard of the present team has dropped since the World Cup as the team has played more Test cricket, and paid tribute to the Indian cricket team saying that India had played better cricket than Sri Lanka and they deserved to be in the final.

"The standard has come down as we played a lot of Test cricket and played 15 to 20 one-dayers, in one dayers and not been very consistent, Test cricket has been pretty good, we haven't been consistent all around, whether it may be bowling or batting or fielding and we need to find the right formula, and we need to work really hard, go back to our basics, get the rhythm back and start all over again," said Jayawardena. "The best of three finals against the two nations is going to be interesting, winning the first game in Sydney is going to be important in that final series, then Brisbane and Adelaide. Two good sides, as both sides are in good form and it should be interesting."

When asked about his captaincy qualities in one day cricket in the CB series, in comparison to the world cup which many thought was astute Mahela said "That given the situation you tend to try a few different things, here and there, certain things work, some don't, I think our bowling has been pretty decent so I didn't have to do too many things, we created a lot of pressure, we kept lot of sides to good scores, and there were situations where we should have won matches, but the concern was our batting, I thought bowlers did a very good job, and on the field as a captain I wasn't under pressure, except for one or two games I was not under pressure at all because the bowlers were doing a pretty good job,".

"The present Indian team is a good one, they really played some good cricket, and credit should go to them, as they played better cricket than we, we haven't been consistent and we deserve not to be in the final, because we haven't been consistent in the tournament, it's simple as that," he said.

Answering a question of the Indian teams performance at the 2007 World Cup Mahela said that, once you have a World Cup as the Indian had, there should obviously be changes. They made changes and the players who had come in have done a fine job, but you will have to wait and see, because in International cricket it is very difficult to be consistent for a period of time, that's the challenge that every team has, so we need to give time and adopt to international cricket.

"The players have the talent and you have to have patience with them, and give them bit more time, you cannot point a finger and say this is where it's going wrong. But you just need to work with them, give them the experience.

The domestic structure that we got do not push them to the limits and once they get into the international cricket that's where they will have to find their weaknesses and try to rectify, some take a bit longer than the others, so you need to have a bit patience, you need to work harder with them and have belief in them there are some really talented players, the way (Kapu) Kapugedera batted shows that there is some potential there.

We need to be a little more patient and the seniors should take more responsibility," he said. Coming back to the match in Hobart against India Mahela said that "quite a bit went wrong for us and I knew that it is going to be quite a bit tough to bat on that wicket in the morning, we had a very good start and again another collapse in the middle, 4 wickets falling quickly and we were struggling a bit. Kapugedera batted really well after that to get us to a decent score,but on that wicket the score was not enough, a score of 260 or 275 would have been a much better score on that wicket."

"We haven't been competitive and consistent enough specially with the bat, when you come to play in a place like Australia, given the fact that we got some really good wickets to play on and the batting has to be in really good form.

You need to put runs on the board which we have not done in the entire series. So that is something we have to really rectify."

"The batting failure was more of a technical problem for not spending more time in the middle. All the batsmen, before they get in, they got out. That's alone is a issue, because the more time you spend there in the middle you get used to the conditions, rhythm and start scoring runs and most of the batsmen couldn't do that and probably that was one of the reasons," said the Sri Lankan captain.