LPL 2021 Controversy: Upset Aravinda De Silva slams LPL 2021 organizer

LPL 2021 Controversy – LPL Controversial Player Draft: All is not well with Lanka Premier League according to Sri Lanka Cricket legend Aravinda De Silva. Aravinda who is also Head of SLC’s Cricket Technical Committee has questioned the credibility of the franchise owners & also the way tournament is being run by the private party and not by the board. De Silva is very unhappy with the way PLAYER DRAFT was handled by the organizers & has asked SLC to take control of the tournament – Follow Lanka Premier League LIVE Updates on InsideSport.IN

in a interview to Sunday Times De Silva said, “The most important thing is to have credible franchises,”

“The Board should be taking control of the cricket side of it, This is not a tournament for people to have fun. Our future of cricket depend on this and therefore we need to make a good foundation of this. The ultimate goal has to be clear but we don’t have that”.

LPL 2021: No Kusal Perera, Angelo Mathews; Chris Gayle, Shoaib Malik, Faf du Plessis…

LPL 2021 Controversy: Aravinda De Silva questions credibility of franchise, says ’SLC should run the event not private parties’

What made De Silva so angry? The former Sri Lanka world cup winner has declared the recently conducted PLAYER DRAFT for LPL 2021 was a complete sham. According to various former Sri Lanka Cricketers, player draft was completely manipulated by the franchise owners with the help of unscrupulous player managers.

What happened in the PLAYERS DRAFT?

Instead of national team players – franchises decided to chose unknown – uncapped players.
Several top players, including eight that were in the United Arab Emirates for the T20 World Cup, were missing from the squads that were finalised in secret.
Playeras like Angelo Mathews, Dinesh Chandimal, Kusal Janith Perera, Akila Dananjaya and Shiran Fernando were ignored.
The whole player-draft was called SHAM by legends like De Silva & Mahela Jayawardena.
Sri Lanka Cricket suffered huge SOCIAL Media Backlash.
Such was the situation that SLC intervened & nominated 10 players from among the dozens of possible candidates who were overlooked by the five franchises.
This, however, did not answer the issues raised over the player draft. It just made a disgruntled few happy.

LPL 2021 Controversy – LPL Controversial Player Draft: Although SLC owns the tournament, IPG, a Dubai-based production company, has full event-management rights including the appointment of franchise owners.

De Silva accused in the interview that no proper guidelines were set by the organizers & the entire exercise looked manipulated.

“These selections have to be done in a proper manner and should go through a transparent process. Otherwise, the owners can bring in their sons to the team. In such a scenario, what’s the point of the Board having rights and clearance from ICC? I think they need to have clear guidelines for everything: to select franchise owners and the selection of both local and foreign players. And those guidelines have to be laid down openly,” said de Silva, whose committee distanced itself from the tournament after its proposals to restructure it ahead of the second edition didn’t receive SLC backing.

“Before a draft is done, we need to set the guidelines. They were not following anything. These are the things that we were very concerned about and this is why we didn’t get involved. These criteria have to be in place and should be well thought out to cover good governance, credibility and transparency. Those are the three main pillars of any successful league. If you break these, you lose confidence in the tournament and, when you lose confidence, it’s difficult to get people involved,” he asserted.

“In most countries where franchise cricket is successful like in India, Australia or UK, the board runs the show. They work closely with franchises, keep renewing depending on how they fare. These franchises have been built over a period of time. One thing that is very clear in these countries is that there’s transparency and cricketing policies are very clear. Transparency has to be a must moving forward. You cannot have new owners popping up every time like mushrooms,” explained de Silva, whose committee is ‘technically’ responsible for making all cricket related decisions.

Meanwhile SLC is yet to officially react on comments by De Silva – but for now the tournament’s credibility is badly hit by the comments made by De Silva. LPL will be played from December 5 to 23 in Colombo and Hambantota

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