(UTV | COLOMBO) – Former World Cup-winning captain Arjuna Ranatunga has blasted the prospects of constructing a new International Cricket Stadium spending 40 million dollars in Diyagama, Homagama. Ranatunga claimed that such huge amount of money should rather be spent on the real development of cricket.
“We have enough international cricket stadiums in Sri Lanka, but some of them such as Asgiriya and Moratuwa have been hung out to dry despite historic matches played on the respective grounds. The plan should be to develop these stadiums and not waste huge sum of money on constructing new stadiums. We already have more cricket stadiums in Sri Lanka than that of Australia. May be some cricket fans in Sri Lanka don’t quite know this,” Ranatunga said.
In 2008, when Arjuna Ranatunga was the Chairman of SLC, he made it very clear that he was against the idea of constructing the Hambantota Cricket Stadium after which he was sacked from his position which many believe, was a consequence of his stand on establishing the stadium.
However, the stadium was constructed targeting the 2011 World Cup but the SLC ran into a financial debacle as a result.
“We should improve our school cricket further and place high prominence on the distribution of sports goods to school cricketers. I know some cricket teams with just three bats, and this is worse when it comes to outstation teams. Sanath (Jayasuriya) and (Muttiah) Murali were players from outstation, they should stop dancing to political tunes and instead develop help players improve further,” said Ranatunga who stood for Muralitharan during the infamous Australian tour in 1995.