Sri Lanka’s batting legend, Mahela Jayawardene is supposedly set to join the coaching staff of England’s cricket team as a consultant. England’s team director, Andrew Strauss hasn’t given his affirmation regarding this , but Paul Farbrace has already contacted the stylish batsmen for the specific role. Paul Farbrace was the coach of the Sri Lankan team, which won the ICC T20 World Cup,2014. Another important fact is that the present coach of England, Trevor Bayliss has had good relations with Jayawardene from his past experience as the Sri Lankan coach.
A spokesperson from ECB has passed out the information that Mahela had been contacted for the consultancy role and is not being viewed as a replacement for Mark Ramprakash. Earlier too, England had used Mushtaq Ahmed as a spin bowling consultant. The 38 year old stylish batsman is one of those few players who have attained the glorious feat of scoring more than 10,000 runs in both ODIs and Test cricket.
England is all set to be tested on the Asian pitches in the next one and a half year. Besides playing against Pakistan in UAE and also touring Bangladesh and India English will host Pakistan and Sri Lanka over the period. Jayawardene, in his lavish international career of 18 years, earned the title of a prolific batsmen in all forms of the cricket. He was an unstoppable force, especially in the subcontinent conditions.
Although joining of prolific run-scorer in the England coaching staff will prove to be a gloomy wave for the Sri Lankan fans, owing to the dismal performances of the team in the recent past and their lack of ability to play as a competent team. But if the Sri Lankan cricketing authorities can’t offer him a long-term satisfactory deal, it seems his knowledge and skills will be fully utilised by the England cricket team.
