India won the first ODI in Dambulla by nine wickets, thanks a brilliant 197-run unbeaten stand between Shikhar Dhawan and Virat Kohli.<\/p>\n
An anguished Sri Lanka coach Nic Pothas blamed the presence of too many brains in the think-tank as one of the reasons for Sri Lanka\u2019s failure.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t fault anyone within that changing room. Yes, we didn\u2019t play our best cricket today. That\u2019s pretty obvious. You do get angry. To say \u2018too many cooks\u2019 is probably accurate,\u201d said Pothas.<\/p>\n
The Sri Lanka team bus was sent off from the Dambulla International Stadium by booing fans after the abject surrender against India.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmotionally you get angry. You get hurt,\u201d fumed the South African, who took over as fielding coach last August and is the interim head coach.<\/p>\n
There have been reports of two power centres emerging in the Sri Lanka dressing room after the 1996 World Cup hero, Asanka Gurusinha, was appointed manager.<\/p>\n
Pothas said there can be improvement only if the squad was given time to develop and criticised constant changes made to the team.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you get consistency within a team, you will see improvements in performance. When we\u2019re getting new players every game, it gets very difficult from a confidence point of view. From the player\u2019s point of view, it\u2019s very difficult. It\u2019s difficult for us the coaching staff to create a strategy.<\/p>\n
Faced with a series of questions over the team\u2019s decline this year \u2013 they lost a home ODI series against Zimbabwe before India blanked them 3-0 in the Test series \u2013 Pothas said he can turn things around if given a free hand and six months.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me, if we were left alone and you could work with this group of players, you could get some stability and consistency over a period of six months. You\u2019d see massive improvements. These are seriously gifted players. They are very, very gifted players,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The selection panel headed by Sanath Jayasuriya has been blamed for the omission of Dinesh Chandimal from the ODI squad. The right-hander is the best Sri Lanka batsman at present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
India won the first ODI in Dambulla by nine wickets, thanks a brilliant 197-run unbeaten stand between Shikhar Dhawan and Virat Kohli. An anguished Sri Lanka coach Nic Pothas blamed the presence of too many brains in the think-tank as one of the reasons for Sri Lanka\u2019s failure. \u201cYou can\u2019t fault anyone within that changing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2638,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2639,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637\/revisions\/2639"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}