Desolate Shehan Jayasuriya expressed concerns to USA Cricket in a letter about the ‘lack of fair opportunity and lack of consistency’ in the organization’s selection process for the National T20 Championship.
Despite having 30 caps for SL, the southpaw surprisingly did not make the cut in a West Zone team that included players like David White and Sami Aslam. Despite having scored 2498 runs at an average of 37 over three MiLC seasons (ranking third on the list of total runs), Jayasuriya was dropped by the selectors after failing to score 16.1 on his Yo-Yo test, a crucial factor in USA selection.
The 32-year-old claims anomalies in the Yo-Yo test’s administration for other players around the US in his scathing letter. “It was brought to my attention by my peers that there were instances where players recorded inferior results to my test results but were still selected” according to Jayasuriya’s letter.
and other situations in which participants self-administered the exam without any safeguards or means of verifying that it was completed accurately. He said, “In reality, I know of cases when players were told to take the exam via video by the Chairman of Selectors of the National Selection Panel in order to ‘avoid any complications’, most likely regarding their selection.
Selectors Mark Demos and Abid Latif from the South West Zone backed up Jayasuriya’s allegations of improper selection practices in a critical letter to Board President Venu Pisike. The two criticised national head selector Michael Voss for his arbitrary selection of Usman Rafiq as the South West Zone team’s captain prior to the Yo-Yo trials, even in the face of the presence of more experienced players like Corey Anderson and Unmukt Chand. Demos and Latif also emphasised how Voss put pressure on them to exclude Anderson from the South West Zone team due to his injuries from the ILT20, which prevented him from attending the yo-yo tryouts.
The letter further claimed that Rafiq received special treatment at Voss’s request. Rafiq was permitted to take the yo-yo exam in his garden in front of no witnesses, per the letter. When Demos challenged Rafiq, Voss said he had passed with a 16.2, but Rafiq only produced a five minute and fifty second video clip of his exam. Cricbuzz is aware that Sami Aslam was not granted the option to take the yo-yo exam remotely.
In a related development, Sami Khan, the Mid West Zone selector, has been exposed by Venkatesh Naidu, a cricket player from the zone who attended the trials in his area. “At least two players with scores of 15.0 and 14.6 have been chosen for the Mid West Zone squad, as I can confirm. For privacy’s reasons, I do not want to reveal the names publicly, but I am prepared to provide the board access to the names in private,” Naidu said. After reaching out to a number of the Chicago trials participants, Cricbuzz received several affirmations of the despicable character of the proceedings.
Demos has also claimed a rather serious malaise inside the board, claiming in a Facebook post that the chief selector is a “puppet” of one of the board members. The turmoil surrounding the selection process has given credence to the claims that certain members of the board are reluctant to include prominent professionals who emigrated after 2019 in the national team.
