42 Year Old UNCLE Sanath to play ODI & T20 Cricket Again ! - Was he behind surfacing the alleged doping offence against Upul Tharanga to earn a place in playing 11 ?

Money Crazy Sanath Jayasuriya who had already tarnished his image to a greater extent will play the Sri Lanka T20 and One Day Internationals in England. The national selectors had picked the 42 year old uncle, former Sri Lanka captain, MP, Sanath on yesterday to join the squad for the series against England starting on June 25 with aT20 at Bristol. The series also features five ODIs against England and one ODI each against Ireland and Scotland.

“I am doing my training as seriously as I’ve ever done in my career and my fitness levels are as good as I’ve been at 18. I am prepared always and am confident of what I can do” Jayasuriya boasted to the media.

National selectors have picked 16 players for the tour squad including all rounder Angelo Mathews (Photo on right - 2) subject to fitness. Interestingly the selectors have opted to include another left handed opener in the squad Dimuth Karunaratne. The 23 year old SSC opener has come through the ranks of Sri Lanka Under 19 team and is incidentally the third player in the squad to come from St. Joseph’s College, Colombo. The promising youngster has been in terrific form right through the recent domestic competitions.

Selectors have also made a sensational decision to appoint left hander Thilina Kandamby as the Vice Captain (Photo on right - 3) of the team while all rounder although Kumar Sangakkara acts as deputy to Dilshan in the test series. Jeewan Mendis has also been selected while dropping Tilan Samaraweera in a move which is likely to give a new look to the Sri Lankan middle order. Mendis, who represents Tamil Union was adjudged the player of the tournament in the recent domestic tournament and has been a proven talent in the local scene.

Pace ace Lasith Malinga who retired from test cricket last month has retained his place in the ODI squad while seamer Nuwan Kulasekara has also retained his place.

Apart from Samaraweera, Farveez Maharoof, Suranga Lakmal, Ajantha Mendis, Chanaka Welagedara and Tharanga Paranavithana who are currently in England for the Test series will return home.

Captain Tillakaratne Dilshan sustaining a hairline fracture in his thumb during the second Test that finished at Lord’s on Tuesday will likely to miss the next test match as well as few ODI matches.

The Sports analysts believe that the decesion to include Uncle Sanaath was the most foolish decesion taken by any sports body. They say, SLC should have given that opportunity to a young talented player.

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Lahore-based Mindstorm Studios have been working on this project for a while now… but the wait is finally over! Mindstorm Cricket Revolution is OUT (no pun intended). As will be amply evident from all the screenshots I’m posting here, the game looks absolutely amazing. There is great attention to detail, a rich team selection, multi-player mode, realistic action and a variety of controls to make gameplay incredibly interesting.

The potential for this game is massive… Cricket is the world’s second most popular sport with over 2 billion fans and watchers internationally. And the numbers are growing. In fact, China is becoming increasingly serious about developing an international quality cricket team and has been seeking Pakistan’s assistance to train its local talent. None other than Pakistan’s legendary batsman, the indomitable Javed Miandad, has been appointed as the Chinese governments’ advisor for Cricket. With China’s inclusion in the world’s cricketing nations, Cricket would rival Soccer as the most loved sport on earth. So, with that sort of market, Mindstorm Studios really have a behemoth of an opportunity looking them square in the eye. We certainly hope they are able to capitalize on it.

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Sri Lanka Looses Home Advantage as a result of the local fools who suggested Keththaramma for the World Cup 2011 !

A match which would have being a victorious one for Sri Lanka turned in to a havock not because our lions performed badly, it's because of the fools who suggested & then developed Keththrammma for the world cup 2011...


Keththaramma stadium was some what a neutral one  till around  2004/2005 for day/night 
matches but turned completly in favour of team batting first after that... So this victory on this pitch relies on the team winning the toss...


The persons who should take the blame are Suraj Dandeniyya, Chairman of Sri Lanka Cricket D 
S De Silva & President Mahinda ( as he is the final decesion taker according to Goverment & 
his henchmens..). Also ICC, for not going for grounds which are equally supportive whether 
bat first or bat second (I don't say that we should go for 100 % equally favoring pitches, 
at leat 40/60 or 60/40). 


Most Sri Lankan fans are asking " why grounds like SSC, Galle Stadium & Dambulla Stadium 
were not developed for the world cup instead of this ground..." which are very much equally favouring...  


Anyway we still will go to the next round but what about the other matches held at this 
ground ? (SL vs AUS match, SL vs KEN,  One Quarter Final, One Semi Final as well as Pk vs CAN, AUs vs PK to be played on this ground )

If something is not done,  Very soon in future Cricket fans (When matches are played at Keththaramma) 
will wait for the toss as well as first secession but will leave the ground, if team they are supporting is batting second..


I think the ICC Decesion taking panel should think twice before giving the Chief Position to Money Crazy Indian in future...When they head something, they don't inspect most important things that has to be inspected....

Cricket Fans left without tickets as website crashes ! - World Cup 2011

If ever a URL contained in its few words an entire saga, it had to be the one that thousands of World Cup ticket buyers found themselves facing on Monday:



http://www.icccwc2011.kyazoonga.com/Tickets/Error/. The ICC World Cup 2011 is now momentarily defined not by its long first round, the presence of its much-abused fringe element, the Associates, or its extremely malleable home advantage quarter-final round, but instead by its ticketing error.


The most prominent errors took place when the official ticketing partners, Kyazoonga.com's servers were overwhelmed with the load on Monday afternoon when they went 'live' with sales for the finals and semi-finals at 1pm India time. Within a matter of ten minutes, the website received hits of close to ten million, many of those caused by people refreshing the site. It would have needed, a Kyazoonga staffer said, a server farm the "size of a football field" to keep up with that kind of demand. The site crashed at 1.05pm and the few people who had got into the system and begun purchasing their tickets found their plans hanging somewhere in cyberspace.


The website went online again at around 9.30pm IST with a statement that no tickets for the finals & semi-finals had been sold on Monday due to the system issues and that updates about the ticket sales would follow. So, all the tickets allocated for online sales will still be available once the Kyazoonga network teams in India, Europe and the United States get their servers up and running again. Kyazoonga were not willing to reveal an approximate time when that was expected to happen.


A Kyazoonga spokesperson said while the surge in traffic had been expected, the site had not anticipated its scale. When ticket sales for World Cup group matches first went live on June 1, 2010, there had been no issues over server capacity. The firm had expected the demand to be several times over for the knockout games, "maybe five to ten times over but not 100." There were even people knocking at the door of the Kyazoonga offices in New Delhi asking to purchase World Cup final tickets.


What has infuriated World Cup fans - whose angry comments on ESPNcricinfo have hit the newswires all day - is not merely the fact that it has been impossible to buy tickets for the final online, but that there are so few tickets available to the general public at a venue with a very small capacity by Indian standards. The 33,000-seater Wankhede Stadium is one of the two smallest Indian grounds hosting World Cup matches. Only Mohali with a capacity of 27,500 is smaller. The rest are as follows: Eden Gardens - 63,000, Motera - 54,000, Chepauk - 45,000, Ferozshah Kotla - 42,000, Nagpur - 45,000, Chinnaswamy - 37,000. Among the 33,000 seats in the Wankhede, only 4000 are for sale to the public - the rest will be distributed to the ICC and the Mumbai Cricket Association's member clubs - which is a disproportionately small number for the biggest event in world cricket. All previous finals have been held at larger venues except for the 2007 final in Bridgetown and the first three editions. Those were played at Lord's, which at the time had a capacity of 28,000, but the number of tickets made available to the public was still somewhere around 14,000.


The ticket pricing at the Wankhede, according to the ICC's official ticket guide, is the most expensive across the World Cup. The price-range for the first match at the Wankhede on March 13, New Zealand v Canada, is between Rs 2500 to Rs 3750. The March 18 match between New Zealand and Sri Lanka ranges from Rs 5000 to Rs 7500. The World Cup finals tickets are priced between Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000.


The other issue surrounding tickets that has affected grounds in India is that ticket sales are heavily dependent on the host team's presence in any match. India are hosting most of the neutral games while co-hosts Bangladesh are staging only the six group matches featuring their own team and two quarter-finals, and Sri Lanka are hosting 13 matches, five featuring the home team, six as stand-in hosts for Pakistan, and one quarter-final and a semi-final.


Source; ESPNcricinfo, AFP

Sri Lanka take series with 26-run win

Sri Lanka completed what was in the end a comfortable victory over West Indies at the SSC in Colombo to take the series 2-0. West Indies lost both their openers for ducks within first 2 overs in chase of Sri Lanka's 277, but Darren Bravo and R Sarwan kept them in the game for a while with a 125-run partnership.

Sarwan fell after reaching his second half-century of the series, and it sparked a collapse. Shivnarine Chanderpaul added only 3 before edging Ajantha Mendis to Mahela at slip (It was one of the best catches at slips !), and then Thisara Perera struck two blows, including the crucial one of Darren Bravo, who was out for 79 (LBW).

West Indies were given some hope by their wicketkeeper Carlton Baugh, who scored a quick 49, but the asking rate was always on the rise, and they ended up being bowled out in 49 overs.

West Indies were left to chase 278 for victory and to square the three-match series one-all against Sri Lanka on a slow and turning SSC pitch. Sri Lanka were asked to bat first on the same pitch where the first two matches were played, and SL top order batsmen got into good starts without going on to make a big score.

Kumar Sangakkara's 75 off 105 balls was the top score, while Mahela Jayawardene contributed 44. The pair added 95 for the third wicket off 114 balls, after openers Tharanga and Dilshan had given a quick start by posting 54 off 50 balls.

Sri Lanka failed to make much headway in the batting Powerplay which they took at 177 for 2 in the 37th over, when they lost the two in-form batsmen - Jayawardene for 44, and Sangakkara.

The departure of the top four batsmen at 205 caused the Sri Lanka run-rate to slump. The middle-order failed to capitalize on the platform laid by the early batsmen as Sri Lanka lost five wickets for 39 runs. Thilan Samaraweera, Chamara Kapugedera (a failure always !) and Thisara Perera all went cheaply as Benn worked himself towards his best ODI bowling figures, finishing with four wickets for 38.

The innings was given a late momentum by Angelo Mathews who slammed a quick 36 off 22 balls to help Sri Lanka cross the 275-run mark - a total which their bowlers should be able to defend on the slow pitch despite the absence of Lasith Malinga and Muttiah Muralitharan who were both rested. It's nice to see the qukie Dilhara bowled well without giving any no ball.

Nike: Cricket

Credits:
Agency: JWT India