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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Jayawardene confident going into World T20

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20120917

HAM­BAN­TO­TA- Sri Lan­ka cap­tain Ma­hela Jayawar­dene isn't wor­ried about the fact that the host na­tion has ever won crick­et's World Twen­ty20 tour­na­ment, say­ing his team has every chance of pulling off the feat. "There's al­ways first time, isn't it," Jay­war­dene told re­porters as Sri Lan­ka pre­pared to take on Zim­bab­we in the open­ing match in Ham­ban­to­ta to­day. "No one has done it, so maybe it's our time to turn it around and make it first." South Africa is the oth­er team in Sri Lan­ka's Group C, with top two ad­vanc­ing to the Su­per Eight. Be­cause of the seed­ings of the tour­na­ment, Sri Lan­ka are as­sured of avoid­ing their two key Asian ri­vals-In­dia and Pak­istan-un­til the semi­fi­nals. In­dia won the in­au­gur­al tour­na­ment in 2007 in South Africa, fol­lowed by Pak­istan win­ning in Eng­land in 2009. Eng­land is the de­fend­ing cham­pi­ons af­ter de­feat­ing Aus­tralia in the fi­nal in the Caribbeans in 2010.

"We're one of the favourites, we are part of the pack," Jayawar­dene in­sist­ed. "You know if we get in­to a good mo­men­tum we could go all the way... Sri Lan­ka is a crick­et crazy coun­try and the ex­pec­ta­tions would be high...we have to ac­cept that." Jayawar­dene is the top-scor­er for Sri Lan­ka in the short­est form of the game with 981 runs in 37 match­es. He has al­so scored one of the two Twen­ty20 cen­turies for Sri Lan­ka and in­ci­den­tal­ly it came against Zim­bab­we dur­ing a group match in the 2010 World Cup. With the likes of Tillakaratne Dil­shan and Ku­mar San­gakkara, who both have al­so scored over 900 runs in Twen­ty20s, Sri Lan­ka forms a for­mi­da­ble bat­ting line­up to chal­lenge any op­po­si­tion in their own back­yard. Ajan­tha Mendis is back from back in­jury to strength­en Sri Lan­ka's spin de­part­ment and with This­ara Per­era es­tab­lish­ing him­self as an all­rounder, the home team looks bal­anced. "We keep pro­duc­ing these tal­ent­ed crick­eters, (it's a) good (se­lec­tion) headache for us," Jayawar­dene said. The 20-over for­mat of the game gives weak­er op­po­si­tions-like Zim­bab­we-a chance to sur­prise any big team on the giv­en day and Jayawar­dene said his play­ers can't take any­thing for grant­ed.

"They (Zim­bab­we) can be com­pet­i­tive and at­tack­ing," he said. "We can­not be com­pla­cent and we need to make sure that we must stick to our game plan and try to ex­e­cute it." Sri Lan­ka al­so be­gan its 50-over World Cup cam­paign from this south­ern port city last year and went on to reach the fi­nal be­fore los­ing to In­dia. "A lot of peo­ple have asked us, you know we've choked in the fi­nals. I'd rather be in that sit­u­a­tion than knocked out in the first round or the sec­ond round," Jayawar­dene said. "That means we are do­ing some­thing pret­ty good in these big tour­na­ments, we are han­dling pres­sure pret­ty well and get­ting to those sit­u­a­tions where we can win tour­na­ments." Group A com­pris­es two pre­vi­ous win­ners In­dia and Eng­land along with Afghanistan. Aus­tralia, West In­dies and Ire­land form Group B while Pak­istan are placed with New Zealand and Bangladesh in the 12-team com­pe­ti­tion. While Sri Lan­ka is ex­pect­ed to be brack­et­ed with Eng­land, West In­dies and New Zealand in the Su­per Eight, the oth­er pool is al­ready be­ing la­beled as the "Group of Death" where archri­vals In­dia, Pak­istan, South Africa and Aus­tralia might vie for two semi­fi­nal places. (AP)


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