The police backed by soldiers have closed a key road leading to the Head Quarters of Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) in the commercial capital of Colombo to discourage enraged protesters who may try to storm the facility, a senior police official said.
He said that public anger has been growing against the SLC administrators after back to back humiliating defeats suffered by the national men’s cricket team in the ongoing ICC World Cup that is being held in India.
Sri Lanka has already lost six of their nine scheduled games including to minnows Bangladesh triggering off a massive call for a total change of the country’s cricket administrators.
There have also been allegations of wide-scale corruption and other malpractices against the present administrators of SLC and the matter has now been dragged into Parliament for debate.
It was only the other day that an irate Sports Minister Roshan Ranasinghe sacked the entire SLC administration and replaced it with an interim committee headed by Sri Lanka’s 1996 world cup winning captain Arjuna Ranatunga.
However a court later issued a stay order on the Minister’s action and the former administration was allowed back into the facility.
The SLC has also been accused of associating with both local and international gaming operators with indications that on fields games could be fixed with the connivance of errant players, officials and so on.
