Sri Lanka’s spate of unorthodox players — Murali, Malinga, Mendis — is not an accident, discovers Our Correspondent. They are meticulously scouted by a system that encourages cricketers who are different

It’s been a long, busy and unusual morning for Sri Lankan cricket’s head coach Jerome Jayaratne. Instead of interacting with youngsters in grass-stained cricketing gear at the academy, he is meeting men in formal suits and polished leather shoes in a conference hall. Jerome has been conducting interviews to pick an assistant coach and it’s quite evident that the scrutiny has been intense as he rubs his tired eyes before starting the conversation.

He is keen to get the right guy for the vital position at the ‘freak factory’ that repackages raw, out-of-the-box cricketers as international heroes. Jerome is the current head of the system that has produced unconventional cricketers such as Muttiah Muralitharan, Sanath Jayasuriya, Lasith Malinga and now Ajantha Mendis. And, as one takes a look at the display window of the academy, one finds that the supply-line isn’t going to stop any time soon. A Malinga lookalike, a leggie who delivers the ball from an awkward angle, and a pacer who till yesterday was a star on the tennis-ball circuit, are a few of the ‘works in progress’. In times of seveal stereotypical cricketers flooding the international market, the Sri Lankan cricket system’s knack of regularly finding someone unorthodox is amazing.

If you thought that it had something to do with the climatic conditions on the island that helped these special players grow on trees and all that Jayaratne & Co had to do was reach out and pluck them off, you would be very far from the truth. A simple statement by Jayaratne explains the deep thought-process that goes behind finding a bowler with six different variations in an over.

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