The camaraderie and friendship that developed between players of different countries during the Indian Premier League may one day make the role of match referees redundant, feels Kumar Sangakkara, the Sri Lankan captain and one of the star performers for King’s XI Punjab.

“Hopefully, it will bring a day when the match referee is not needed to have a look at the games,” Sangakkara said on the eve of IPL 2, which gets under way in South Africa on Saturday.

In an interview with the ICC website, Sangakkara said that the greatest experience for him in the first edition of IPL, apart from playing some excellent cricket, was: “we’re also playing with and against not just your usual opponents but also with your own teammates”.

A top wicketkeeper-batsmen in world cricket today, Sangakkara has his erstwhile skipper Mahela Jayawardene as his teammate in IPL, while their team is skippered by India’s Yuvraj Singh.

Holding forth on a range of subjects including the Twenty20 World Cup in June, Sangakkara says he does not see the five-week-long IPL as an overkill of the game. “I think you always have to balance things out. If you don’t play the IPL then we [Sri Lanka] have no cricket and we’d just be training at the nets and doing all our preparation work – but there is nothing like match practice. So I think the players will be well prepared having played the IPL to go into the Twenty20 World Cup. The conditions, however, will be different in England.”

On the issue of too-much-cricket debate, Sangakkara felt that it was not going to change in near future. “It’s going to be a very hard workload especially for bowlers, but it gives countries ideal opportunities to test their bench strength where they can rotate players and make sure that the best XI is always in the best physical and mental shape – and at the same time give exposure to the fringe players who need the opportunity and exposure to show everyone what they can do and try to break into the national side.”
Source – gulfnews.com