Angelo Mathews expresses shock over Eranga’s heart scare
Jun 21, 2016 at 5:44 AM
Sri Lankan skipper Angelo Mathews has expressed his shock over feeling Shaminda Eranga’s racing heartbeat during Sri Lanka’s second ODI at Malahide on Saturday.
Sri Lankan pacer Eranga, reported some discomfort after batting late on in Sri Lanka’s win over Ireland in Malahide in a one-day international and did not take the field for the hosts’ innings as he headed straight to the hospital.
The team management said that they were not aware of Eranga having any past heart conditions.
“At the time he called me and said ‘something has happened to me’,” said Matthews. “He was warming up and just before we went on the field, he said something happened to me, can you touch my heart because it is beating fast. I felt something unusual so I quickly called the physio and the physio went to the doctor with him. It was a shocking incident.”
There was more blow for the Sri Lanka fast bowler as he was suspended by the International Cricket Council having being found to have an illegal action, hours after he was taken to hospital for tests.
“It has been a tough 48 hours for him,” said Matthews, “And the whole team is behind him and we are fully supportive of him. It was an unfortunate incident just before we went on to the field.”
“It’s another unfortunate incident where his action has proved to be illegal and he will have to go back and work with the fast-bowling coaches and come back strong.”
“We are very confident he will come through both – his condition as well as his action – so we are very supportive of him and the whole team are behind him.”
The pacer will stay in Ireland until the reports of the tests come out and will leave the country for Sri Lanka only after being declared medically fit.
Losing Eranga would certainly be a big blow to an already depleted Sri Lankan attack. They have already lost pacers Dhammika Prasad and Dushmantha Chameera to injury.
After losing the test series by 2-0, Mathews sounded hopeful of giving a good fight to the English team in the upcoming series.
“It was pretty unfortunate that we haven’t performed well in the Test series but we kept improving game by game and as time went on we really started hitting our straps and we had some convincing wins in Ireland,” he said.
“But England is a completely different team, we still have to play our best cricket to beat them here.”
“We haven’t done well in the recent past but we’ve played a lot of T20 games rather than one-dayers. We are a forceful unit when it comes to one-dayers, we’ve got a good set of guys and a bit of experience.”