Arjuna Ranatunga, the former Sri Lanka cricket captain, will until thy kingdom come, have an axe to grind with the sport’s administrators. But he could be right this time when he declared quite cut-up that Sri Lanka has been ridiculed by India which has decided to send to the island what he called a ‘B team’ to play six matches.
It means the Indians have themselves confirmed that they are here to have “fun” in what they think must be a funny place.
“We are just here (in Sri Lanka) to have some fun,” one of the players Suriyakumar Yadav said at a Sri Lanka Cricket-organised video media conference and his remarks were also picked up by the AFP news agency filed for worldwide consumption.
Yadav was only six years old when Ranatunga stood on the podium in 1996 across the Indian border in neighbouring Pakistan lifting the World Cup that his team went through a terrible ordeal to win after smashing India twice in the tournament.
One wonders what “fun” the Indians are here for, given the social distancing and hand sanitizing rules to combat coronavirus. To the average hardworking Sri Lankan man his island is not a place of “fun” even in normal circumstances.
But many in Sri Lanka on the contrary see India as a place of “fun” or a place to have “fun” any which way the word is construed.
On the other hand could it be that the Indians are right to think of Sri Lanka as a funny place with its people always on the look out for fun even if the country is in flames.
Certainly some cricketers have had “fun” and got away scot-free until a social media cameramen, who will get no Pulitzer prize, captured some of Sri Lanka’s players looking for some “fun” in the dead of night while their team was burning in defeat in England.
The whole of Sri Lanka now awaits to see if her “fun” loving cricketers will also see the funny side of things with an inquiry against them pending.