Why the British are not our favourite friends

[Conant]

cricket365.com

England's moral compass

Over the course of the next week, Sanath Jayasuriya will play a couple of matches for Sri Lanka after blatant political intervention secured him a farewell gig.

Were it not for the fact that he's currently a member of parliament for President Mahinda Rajapaksa's Sri Lanka Freedom Party, who stand accused of war crimes and more recently of 'enforced disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment' of their own citizens then this might be stomachable, even if it would still be making a mockery of a bilateral series in which the idea is generally to field your best XI in the unwavering quest for victory.

Unfortunately Jayasuriya is no longer just a cricketer and so, as Andy Bull of The Guardian and the C365 Media Column have pointed out, his presence is a genuine scandal.

He may have come to power after the alleged war crimes, but he is still part of a government who refuse to allow an independent investigation into those allegations and who continue to clamp down on free speech.

These are still just allegations of course. But then how come the British government has not registered so much as a peep on the issue, having lobbied against the visit of Zimbabwean sportsmen in the past? Sportsmen who, unlike Jayasuriya, have no links whatsoever to an allegedly brutal government.

Whatever you make of Jayasuriya's situation, the double standards are clear.

http://www.cricket365.com/soapbox/story ... k-Bad-Week

[eugene]

Jayasuriya played well in the T20 yesterday - he picked up a couple of wickets with his useful bowling. It is debatable what war crimes were committed by the Sri Lankan government during their destruction of the Tamil Tiger rebels. The tamils were a terrorist organisation themselves who carried out attacks against ordinary civilians over many decades.