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Thilan Samaraweera continue to draw 2.5 million salary even after his removal as batting Coach

Written by N Krishnamurthy

Thilan Samaraweera, the discarded batting coach of Sri Lanka national team, is still drawing 2.5 million salary and enjoying all the perks, Cricket Age reliably learns.

In December 2018, Samaraweera had been removed from the batting coach position midway through the New Zealand tour. Back then, the Sri Lanka Cricket Board (SLC) had appointed Jon Lewis as his successor and put Samaraweera at board’s high performance center at Khettarama.

According to sources, Since his removal from the national team setup, Samaraweera has just been going at Khettarama, sitting here and there entire day and drawing his salary of 2.5 million.

Recently, he was named coach of one of the provincial team in the recently concluded domestic tournament, but even there he failed miserably as coach.

Samaraweera, who played 81 tests and 56 ODIs for Sri Lanka, has turned out one of the least successful coach in Cricket history!

In 2017, Samaraweera had been removed as a batting consultant of Bangladesh even after being offered an extension. Later, just to make Sri Lanka’s head coach Chandika Hathurasingha happy, SLC hired him as batting coach, but he failed miserably there as well. His biggest return to Sri Lanka cricket even after getting paid millions that he completely destroyed the batting technique of two of national team’s highly rated young players – Kusal Mendis and Dhananjaya de Silva.

Even after all these failures, he is still getting big deals in Sri Lanka cricket and drawing millions as salary, only because he is a close associate of Chandika Hathurusingha.

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N Krishnamurthy