Ceylon Today Editorial

Better the Confidence Better the Professional

10 September 2016

Sanath Jayasuriya, Chief Selector Sri Lanka Cricket, was recently heard in a TV interview say that the youngsters in the Sri Lanka team are not really professional players. This he says is due to the fact that you have to keep pushing them into action, in other words they need to be, so to say, spoon fed.

Sportsmen have to be ready to play on the international stage before being called up for national duty even to play in the A team. No coach is able to undertake touching up players at that level, they have to come ready. Denis Rodman an American basketball player when asked before the game "Are you ready to play?" said I was born ready, and that is confidence.

Sri Lanka is one of the countries where the cricket structure is very strong. Cricket is played in abundance and now even at grass root level. No one else but the chief of selectors would vouch for this better. The fact is he is one of the last of cricketers joining the mainstream, from outstations, to have been lucky enough come under a proper coach while still there.

If, Sanath Jayasuriya could have learnt the trade and become a true and proper, professional quality cricketer, surely, he should know what was ticking in him to be one; if so, there is hope that these new players can still be trained to be ones like him too.

There was a time when even school coaches were doing their work for the love of the game. In that situation also they had sense enough to also talk to their students about the way one conducts himself as a cricketer. Even though then professionalism in cricket was at its early stages, young cricketers got an idea cricket had another facet to it; this went on to make cricketers get the feel of how to be a professional. With that kind of training they were able to get employment and continue playing the game, at somewhat of a professional level.

A professional is one who knows his trade; when cricketers know about the game and how it is played from there onwards they will fit in to it better and gain more insight. Once that is done properly the youngster gains confidence filled with such knowledge.

Take a country like South Africa that was the best cricket side in the sixties until in the 1970s they got thrown out of the system because of their apartheid policies. They have not been able to reach those standards to date since being accepted back in the 1990s. Ten years later they appointed the twenty- three-year-old Grahame Smith to lead the team, and the team was full of professionals. The authorities may have been so confident on the youngster to let him lead a team of professionals on the international stage which had more hardened professionals leading other countries, on it.

There are reasons that go to make the average Sri Lankan youngsters not to be open and express themselves. Most young people in Sri Lanka suffer from this due to being told to listen and do what you are told from their childhood. As sports can make them open up there is the need to get them to learn to be more open now than in the past.

This stifling should be stopped for athletes to give their best, being more accepted in a free society. This is why it is important that schools make sport a subject in school. That is the way to get youngsters freed from being pressured into subservience.

Unless a youngster's mind is free from such they are made to succumb to peer pressures and parental influences that can be detrimental in a way. They may be harmful to certain attitudes that come with sports activity and building confidence. Youngsters, much to the disliking of elders, may begin speaking out which may be seen as being disobedient in a society that demands respecting seniors. In the more urban atmosphere now with globalization, it is already taking place with seniors accepting the changing culture of the youngster. Soon villages will catch it.

Sri Lankan families must begin to understand the value of building confidence in their children who have to intermingle with other global societies for survival in future. The average Sri Lankan youngster has very little exposure and being dependent when thrown in the deep end may be the reason they are unable to make decisions with ease, on their own. This is something that should be in the school curriculum's taught by professionals.