Sri Lanka board defends decision to play at R Premadasa Stadium
Despite all the issues associated with the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, the venue for the second Test match between West Indies and Sri Lanka, the Lankan cricket board has said that the decision to
stage a game on that ground was to allow its cricketers to acclimatize themselves to the ground. Premadasa hosts a few games in the 2011 edition of the World Cup.
Colombo is the only city in the world which boasts of three international cricket stadiums, which is a part of the reason why the board was panned by the critics for keeping the game at Premadasa.
With renovation going on in the stadium, it allows only a few hundred spectators to watch the game. The cricketers have a struggle on their hand as well as there is no pavilion while the media facilities
are bare minimum.
The construction work, which had to be stopped for the duration of this Test match has left behind concrete constructions interspersed with giant iron rods. However, what makes it even more intriguing is
that the tournament is less than three months away and yet, the work on the stadium which will host an important Sri Lanka-Pakistan and http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Sri-Lanka-c758-Australia game apart from the quarter-final and the semi-final is far from over.
However, according to the secretary of the Sri Lanka Cricket, http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Nishantha-Ranatunga-c79713, "The reasons for hosting a match [at the Premadasa] are purely cricketing ones. It is our duty to ensure that our cricketers
have the maximum amount of exposure at World Cup venues so that home advantage will be fully realised in the tournament."
This is surprising given that Sri Lanka take on http://www.senore.com/Cricket/West-Indies-c760 on the same ground in a couple of ODIs later, which could have been a better way of initiating the players to the ground.
Making matters worse is the fact that it has been almost one year since an international game was played on this ground that meant that none of the captains, Kumar Sangakkara and Darren Sammy, had too much
idea about the pitch either.
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