UTV | COLOMBO – Former Sri Lankan cricketer Mahela Jayawardena has been elected cricket committee Chairman at the Sinhalese Sports Club (SSC) during their Annual General Meeting held at the club premises last Tuesday.
After serving an uninterrupted period of one decade as the Chairman, Samantha Dodanwela opted to step down to give way to his younger colleague Mahela Jayawardena. SSC, a club with a history of over 12 decades has produced some outstanding cricketers who have represented the National team. Mahela, a product of Nalanda College, Colombo, has played cricket in all age groups and later joined the SSC in 1997 as a schoolboy cricketer. That year, he was called for National duty.
Jayawardene made his Test cricket debut in 1997 and One-Day Internationals (ODI) debut the following season. In 2006, he made the highest ever score by a Sri Lankan in Test cricket with 374 runs in the second Test of Sri Lanka’s home Test series against South Africa. He has a test cricket average of just under 50 and a One-Day average in the 30’s. He is the first player in the history of Sri Lankan cricket to score over 10,000 Test runs. He is also the second Sri Lankan player to score more than 10,000 runs in ODIs.
Jayawardene was a key member of the team that won the 2014 ICC T2- World Cup and was part of the team that made it to the final of 2007/2011 Cricket World Cup, 2009/2012 ICC World T-20.
In 2006, Jayawardene was named as the best international captain of the year and was nominated in 2007 as the best Test cricket player of the year by ICC.
Jayawardene also worked as an international TV commentator in the first Test at Headingley between England and Sri Lanka in 2016. Mahela Jayawardene is the only player as of now to have scored a hundred in both a World Cup final and a semi-final.
He coached the Mumbai Indians, which won the last Indian Premier League (IPL).
Meanwhile, Samantha Dodanwela, an old boy of Trinity College, Kandy, a highly-skilled all-rounder representing his school at Cricket joined the SSC to represent them in 1991. He established a record for his club, claiming 60 wickets in eight matches at the Division 1 Premier Cricket Tournament, as a seam bowler who opened the bowling for them. He was also called to the National Pool in the same year. DN