Jayawardene’s Resignation: Self Inflicted

Sreelata YellamrazuFeb 12 2009

There is no reward for honesty. Mahela Jayawardene, just days earlier, admitted that his own form with the bat in the one day internationals was a worry. When a captain is honest, he is praised. When he hides, he is giving a hiding. But honesty often has a price to pay and it has come in the form of Mahela Jayawardene resigning from the captaincy post for Sri Lanka.

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There was little doubt that Jayawardene was all class when he first came into the Sri Lankan team as a batsman. But it was evident not far from then that he would also make a benevolent captain whose good heartedness would not mean a compromise of ambitions. If anything, perhaps after Arjuna Ranatunga, Jayawardene possessed the ability to rally this team around his ideals and steer them to glory.

His announcement decision then to resign from the captaincy after the Test series against Pakistan, coming as it did after the Twenty20 international match against India, appeared to be a direct fall out of the criticism he copped back home for a poor one day series that gave India their first win over Sri Lanka in the bilateral series in the Emerald Isles.

But what did go wrong? If Jayawardene’s words are to be taken at face value, this would have suggested that he was done with the job for quite some time and simply biding time for the appropriate moment to hand over the reins, “his is something I have been considering for some time as it has been my long-held belief that my successor should have at least 18 months in the job to imprint his vision on the team for the 2011 World Cup.”

That would be considered an extremely noble, unselfish thought on the part of the captain when most others would fight tooth and nail to hold onto it. Jayawardene himself is the most successful Sri Lankan captain with a 62.5 per cent win percent, having led Sri Lanka to fifteen wins in twenty-six Test and losing seven. His one day captaincy has not been towering with 54 wins and 35 losses in 94 matches, though he has led the team to the World Cup finals in the 2007 World Cup.He himself could have trusted himself to get into form in the shorter version and in turn, inspire the team. But perhaps he felt that captaincy was becoming a stalemate with himself being unable to crack the code on why he was struggling in the ODI format.

However, it is not hard to see what prompted this decision. There was a growing feeling in the Sri Lankan camp that they were not quite gelling like they did in winning days. Somehow bereft of plans, unusual with recent Sri Lankan teams that tend to usually pave way for innovations in the sub continent, their fielding amongst the best in the sub continent was horrifically poor.

Naturally it then makes sense that perhaps Jayawardene himself was either doubting if he was still good for the job or whether he sincerely felt that the team needs new ideas that could only come through a new face in the skipper’s role. What is not uncertain is that Jayawardene has taken criticism about his own batting form, especially in the one day internationals, in his stride and even willingly admitted that he was concerned himself. Now where that puts him in the context of the next World Cup in 2011 remains to be seen. Age will certainly not be a factor given that he is a batsman and only thirty-one. But whether his motivation in that format is flagging or simply in need of a break for rejuvenation.

It has to also be taken in the consideration the peripheral politics within the board, as Muttiah Muralitharan pointed out in his column, that have often left Sri Lanka without leadership in the management area. The tussles, the wrangling over players, over haphazard scheduling like with the series against England without taking into consideration of their prior commitment to the IPL, the constant pressure as the board fought veiled political battles with BCCI, could also have taken a toll with Jayawardene standing up in a leadership role within the team.

Kumar Sangakkara now becomes the frontrunner for the post, although Muralitharan has harboured hopes of captaincy in the past and the board will not perhaps look regressively back on bringing Sanath Jayasuriya back in the role, not at forty and when he favours playing the shorter version of the game.

Jayawardene’s resignation does not put to an end an era. Rather it is raising many new questions, a large part of them that will revolve around him alone.

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