Sri Lankan Buddhists celebrated Vesak over the weekend, to commemorate the day Buddha was born, died and attained enlightenment. The newspaper advised its readers that it was ``perhaps best to contemplate in this Vesak week, the impermanence of glory and all that is material.''

One cricket writer in the Sunday Island also demonstrated the Buddhist teaching of forgiveness in arguing that ``cricket is so gloriously uncertain that the heroes of four years ago should not be banished during failure.''

``As Sri Lanka prepare to surrender the Cup, Lankans who basked along with their heroes of 1996 should remember that you cannot always win, there must be a winner and a loser as well,''he pointed out.

The state-owned Sunday Observer carried a centrespread of photographs from Sri Lanka's match against Zimbabwe, the only encounter that the defending champions had won till today.

But some not-so-forgiving cricket experts were scorching in their analysis of why the team had failed so dismally. ``It is time for the authorities that matter to take stock of the present levels of national cricket. It is not the time to plan grandiose schemes like putting up fancy stadia in godforsaken places spending millions. It is time now to develop the nurseries that feed the national team,'' the Sunday Leader wrote.

Surprisingly, few have called for the scalps of Ranatunga and the ageing top order of the team, but many have laid into Board officials, selectors and politicans for the decline of Sri Lankan cricket. Others called for a coach of the calibre of Dave Whatmore, who fashioned Sri Lanka's winning performances in 1996.

A Sri Lankan letter-writer to the Sunday Island had aunique point of view. According to him, Sri Lanka's massive defeat at the hands of India at Taunton was divine retribution handed out to Arjuna Ranatunga for delaying a declaration in a 1997 encounter with India at Colombo ``to establish a valueless world's Test team record score of some 950 plus runs.''

``God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Reciprocation came in spate on May 26. India has settled an overdue account. Praise be to God,'' wrote the correspondent.