The news of young Dinesh Chandimal spurning offers from two IPL franchises must be heartening for Sri Lankan fans, who had been silent observers to the unsavoury controversy about players from the island nation in IPL 6.
Just appointed as the Twenty20 skipper of his country, Chandimal has snubbed offers from Delhi Daredevils and Pune Warriors in the wake of a humiliating scenario where no Lankan player will be allowed to take part in matches in Chennai.
While the IPL is no stranger to controversies in its five-year history, the recent one of politics interfering with sport is indeed an appalling one — while no less intriguing is the discreet silence of the so-called “voices of cricket” so far on the issue. Only Arjuna Rantunga raised a voice of dissent when he called for Sri Lankan players to boycott the league and put the country before cash, though it was difficult to say if it was patriotism or the opposition politician in him speaking.
The mutual decision of keeping Sri Lankan players out of Chennai matches only, ostensibly for their safety in view of the recent anti-Sri Lankan sentiments prevailing in the state of Tamil Nadu, is a humiliating one to say the least. Yes, India’s recent vote in the UN Human Rights Council against Sri Lanka fanned the sentiments to some degree, but the history of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has festered for over four decades now and has never really come in the way of these genial band of cricketers plying their trade on the Chepauk turf.
So, it’s now a situation where Pakistan cannot play in Mumbai and Sri Lanka cannot play in Chennai — one does not know what else there is in store. There could have been a more honourable solution though to the entire problem if the authorities were so concerned about the safety of Sri Lankan players — the most acceptable being removing matches from the state capital of Tamil Nadu.
There is also a precedent of the IPL governing council removing the matches of the erstwhile Deccan Chargers from Hyderabad to venues like Visakhapatnam and Cuttack because of the Telengana agitation in Andhra Pradesh in 2011. However, the Indian board president E.Srinivasan, who is also the owner of Chennai Super Kings, was not ready to toe that line, even though some of the franchise owners have rightly raised a call for shifting the matches from Chennai — at least for the knockout stages.
Given the intricate nature and back-to-back games on the IPL itinerary, it will also be a logistical nightmare to change venues at the 11th hour. Hence, it looks like some of the best ambassadors of the game like Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara are now left with no choice but to stay back in the confines of their hotel room as their teams fight it out in the middle.
Unfortunate, but then politics and sport have always gone hand in hand.
