Spat between senior Sri Lankan players and Muttiah Muralitharan gets ugly

Sri Lanka cricket great Muttiah Muralitharan last week slammed senior Sri Lankan cricketers for not allowing young players to sign the contracts because of their pay cut. He slammed four senior players in the national team for the dispute over central contracts.

In the past, many Sri Lankan senior players such as Angelo Mathews, Kusal Perera, Dimuth Karunaratne among others have been involved in a long-standing dispute with their cricket board over central contracts.

Earlier reports suggest that several Sri Lankan cricketers refused to ink a contract with the board due to a play dispute after agreeing to play against England on a tour contract.

While the players said that they did not sign the contracts due to transparency issues, Muralitharan said it was mainly due to senior cricketers getting less pay under the new performance-based system.

“This year we think they don’t need a central contract, we can go with tour contracts,” Murali told Hiru TV.

After Muralitharan leveled the allegations, Mathews and Karunaratne hit back at the Test cricket’s highest wicket-taker.

As per media reports, in a letter to Muralitharan, they wrote, “It is unfair and untrue that you state that the issue in the contracts was purely money. We feel that you were not properly informed of the correct sequence of events, or was possibly given wrong information. Possibly by parties who wish to create a rift between the players and the administration and create disharmony,” the letter added.

It further said, “You seemingly showed a great degree of dissatisfaction and hatred against the entire team and us, where we were referred to by name… continuously harping on failures of players could be quite detrimental to the players morale. Easily, such could have been done at meetings rather than on a Live TV program.”

Currently, senior Sri Lankan players are without deals Sri Lanka Cricket withdrew offers of annual contracts. However, some players later signed the contracts but the SLC offered them only tour contracts.

Due to this new move, cricketers will not be paid on a monthly basis anymore.