Are Sri Lanka a minnow team without a couple of key players?

I really fear for their future. The batting is the most worrying. They rely so much on Sanga and Jayawardene, Jayasuriya is over the hill, and none of their young players are making an impact.

They tend to produce pretty decent quick bowlers, and they'll more than likely have some spinners behind Murali who could at least bowl sides out on Sri Lankan pitches, but the batting looks dire.

I've thought this for a while. One of the less annoying things about Murali's ongoing career is that it has made an otherwise rubbish team semi-competitive.

They do have had a knack of producing world class players out of nowhere, so hopefully they can magically pull another Aravinda De Silva out of the hat.

This Australian tour of SL is going similarly as India's '99 tour went.

India too was whitewashed in tests and won just 1/8 ODIs in the C&U series.

But Sri Lanka has nowhere near the talent pool that India has. It could also be argued that Sri Lanka's lone victory (The ODI in Canberra) was achieved thanks to Duckworth-Lewis being extremely kind to them.

Henry wrote:It could also be argued that Sri Lanka's lone victory (The ODI in Canberra) was achieved thanks to Duckworth-Lewis being extremely kind to them.

Quite true. If not for that game being rain shortened one, they might've found it hard to win that game as well as the one against India at Gabba.

Now that someone mentioned that game, it made mroe sense when a minimum of 25 overs for both sides was considered more appropriate for bringing in the D&L calculators. It makes no sense to have the side batting first for 30 overs and then giving the chasing side 20 overs to get the revsied target. Such a match would have been unfair to any team playing it. That match should have been abondoned in a NR.

Henry wrote:I really fear for their future. The batting is the most worrying. They rely so much on Sanga and Jayawardene, Jayasuriya is over the hill, and none of their young players are making an impact.

They tend to produce pretty decent quick bowlers, and they'll more than likely have some spinners behind Murali who could at least bowl sides out on Sri Lankan pitches, but the batting looks dire.

Turns out the batting and bowling stocks were equally bereft.

They're lucky that Sangawardene are still going strong and Herath has stepped out of Chuckali's shadow to be a more than capable Test spinner. But there's sod all in the pace department and no top class batting successors on the horizon. Add to that the internal disputes and they could be descending to Bangladesh levels before long.