Except for the coach of the national side, everybody else in the Lankan system is a local. How important is it to have an indigenous system in place?
I learnt cricket coaching in Australia. I have seen the Aussie and the English systems closely. But that doesn’t mean that we are doing what they did. We have taken all their knowledge and extracted what is relevant to us. Some things you can implement and others you can’t. What we have done is learn from them and make a system that works for us.

So what needs to be filtered out of their system?
To me, the structure and environment are important. We need to look at the facilities they have. They are a developed country and we are a developing country, so facilities will never be the same. But we have the human resources and that is our advantage. We don’t have to convince the kids here to play cricket, there they have to since there are other sporting options too.

Does tennis ball cricket see the mushrooming of unconventional cricketers?
There is a guy at the academy called Nuwan Pradeep, who I think will be in the national side soon. There was a tennis ball tournament organised by a television company here and they picked 20 players from there and handed them over to us. We saw this guy and drafted him in. Young boys should be encouraged to play tennis ball cricket. When the boys are small, they find the bats heavy. That’s the reason they don’t grow up playing horizontal shots. All they do is block the ball and play too straight. As for a tennis ball player, he is used to playing cuts, pulls and hooks... it helps in becoming a complete cricketer.

... contd.