In a letter to the board, he says “past greats of SL have shown 2nd half of the career is where greater performances are made”
Andrew Fidel Fernando14-Jul-2021Sri Lanka batter Dinesh Chandimal has asked SLC and its technical committee for clarity about his future in the national team.In a letter addressed to the head of the technical committee Aravinda de Silva, which also has several SLC officials copied, Chandimal asked for “an opportunity to meet with you and the respected committees to discuss my future, in playing cricket for Sri Lanka”. This letter comes in the wake of news that Angelo Mathews is considering retirement, and only months after Thisara Perera announced his own retirement.Essentially, this is more of a fallout from the recent contracts saga. SLC’s technical committee – which comprises de Silva, Kumar Sangakkara, Muttiah Muralitharan and Roshan Mahanama – had been instrumental in devising a new contracts scheme, which proved to be unpopular with the senior players in particular. After a long contracts stand-off, though, SLC withdrew the annual contracts they had offered basically as a punishment for rejecting the contracts in the first place, which means that cricketers who mostly play Tests – such as Chandimal or Dimuth Karunaratne – would be left without income from the board for the majority of this year.Related
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They are also not contractually bound to the board at present, and several of those uncontracted players are understood to be considering opportunities overseas.In his letter, Chandimal outlined his playing statistics across all three formats, and compared his numbers with those of former greats before the age of 30, though he is himself 31. He then made the point that “the past greats of Sri Lanka cricket have shown that 2nd half of the career is where greater performances are made”, before asking “why are those very people not seeing the value at this juncture, in me?””My performance statistics and my health statistics indicate I am more than capable of performing at the highest level at the moment,” the letter said.At present, Chandimal’s place in any of Sri Lanka’s XIs is not assured. Under Mickey Arthur, Sri Lanka have tended not to pick him for limited-overs cricket due to his modest strike rate. His overall Test numbers are better than most of his team-mates’, but even in that format he had been dropped from the XI for Sri Lanka’s most recent series against Bangladesh. Chandimal last made a Test century in mid-2018, and has averaged 22.43 across 25 innings since.Excerpts from Chandimal’s letter:
