Sri Lanka captain Dimuth Karunaratne is refusing to give up on his team’s World Cup hopes ahead of Monday’s must-win clash against the West Indies.
Karunaratne’s side no longer have control of their World Cupfate after losing to already-eliminated South Africa on Friday.
A victory in Durham against the West Indies, who are alsoabout to head home, could keep 1996 champions Sri Lanka in with a slenderchance of making the semi-finals of the 10-team tournament going into theirlast match against India.
They will need help from other results, but Karunaratne isconfident his team’s batsmen are ready to power them to a strong finish intheir last two group games.
“We can’t control the other games, you know. Sometimesthey were playing really well, sometimes they couldn’t,” Karunaratne toldreporters on Sunday.
“I think we had a good chance. Still we have a chance,I think, but we have to win these two games and wait to see what will happen inthe other games.
“Only we can control the matches we are going to play,the two matches, so we are trying to give our best and try to win these twomatches and, hopefully, if we have a chance, we definitely can be in the topfour teams.”
Sri Lanka’s World Cup campaign has been undermined by poorbatting, with their surprise win over hosts England largely achieved due tofine bowling.
Karunaratne and Kusal Perera have both made half-centuries,but no Sri Lankan has reached three figures yet. “I think the batting is the maincollapse, you know. We couldn’t get a hundred,” Karunaratne said.
“We played like six, five matches, so we couldn’t get ahundred, only a couple of 50s in our team, so that is the only major thing.
“If you want tocompete with the good sides, you definitely got to have a good batting line-upand you have to put runs on the board.”
Karunaratne has resisted the temptation to bring in an extrabatsmen after Nuwan Pradeep suffered chickenpox, calling up bowler KasunRajitha instead.
“If some fast bowler gets injured, there is no fastbowler, so you want to take a fast bowler into the squad in case if someone getinjured,” he added.”We have enough batsmen. They havecapabilities to score runs, but the only thing is they were scoring but as aunit we couldn’t perform really well in these matches.”