Lankans have lorded it over Pakistan

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Unless new coach Dav Whatmore has taught Pakistan’s cricketers an effective rain dance, Sri Lanka should win the first Test in a canter.

In batting, bowling and fielding, they’ve proved to be at least a couple of steps ahead.
But I’ve found even this terribly one-sided contest engaging for the superb batting of Dilshan, Sangakkara and Jayawardene — Lanka’s Big Three as they are called — and the vexing off-spin of Saeed Ajmal even though — barring a miracle — he is likely to finish on the losing side.
The contest between Lanka’s batting trio and Ajmal’s pehla, doosra and teera is going to be the highlight of this series. The first round has gone to the Lankans, but by no means is this series over. Of course Ajmal will need runs from the Pakistan batting to make a impact.
The jarring note from this Test has been the umpiring. It’s been appalling, with at least three decisions so incorrect that in a more tightly-fought match they would have invited outrage. In the event, Pakistan were so heavily outplayed that none of these mistakes mattered, but a moot question arises: would not technology have compensated for such incompetence?
As is known, the Decision Review System is not being implemented in this series. Hawk Eye, Hot Spot and other such technologies which facilitate the DRS don’t come cheap and neither the Sri Lankan nor Pakistan cricket boards have the financial wherewithal to invest in these.
This is hardly a new occurrence, I know. But the on-off use of DRS remains contemporary cricket’s most prickly and contentious issue simply because it leads to inconsistency. For instance, some Test series’ have technology in place to assist in the umpiring, some not at all.
The DRS has had a rocky existence in the sport, more so because of the opposition to it by the BCCI after a couple of series. All Tests and ODIs involving India are now bereft of DRS; add to this other cash-strapped boards which are opting out, and you have a situation where the deployment of technology is becoming farcical.
Administratively — on and off the field — this means that the sport is pulled in opposite directions leading to unhappiness not just among administrators, but more importantly even among players. Mind you, I am not arguing only in favour of technology; rather for greater consistency. Evidence over the last year or so has shown that bugs and flaws exist in the best technologies. In that sense, the BCCI’s adamancy in not accepting say Hawk Eye was not entirely ill-founded.
There is also the money aspect, which is not unimportant. The ICC nowadays has control over the umpires, but has no jurisdiction over whether DRS should be implemented in a series or not because the funding for this comes from the participating countries — and not every Board, as has been mentioned, is exactly in good health.
While this is a dilemma no doubt, it is a situation that demands urgent and immediate attention from all stakeholders. Cricket cannot be run on parallel tracks where some matches subscribe to DRS and others don’t. That is bizarre. It has to be an either or situation, not on-off.
No other major sport in the world tolerates such duality and in a sense this reflects the dissonance between member countries within it. But this has reached a stage where all cricket playing countries need to sit across the table again and take fresh stock.