Croosepulle cruises to top spot
Dialog 4G-the Sunday Times Most Popular Schoolboy Cricketer of the Year 2017
As the combined results for 14th and 15th week of the Dialog 4G-the Sunday Times Most Popular Schoolboy Cricketer of the Year 2017 comes out, a major change has occurred in the top position of the All-island Schools segment. For the first time in nine long weeks, Lasith Croospulle of Maris Stella College Negombo dethrones the stronghold of Navindu Nirmal of St. Aloysius College Galle to reign supreme.
Lasith, as he usually collects, gained 29086 votes during the past two weeks, the highest received by a schoolboy cricketer so far in this competition within a fortnight, tops the All-island Schools segment with a resounding tally of 99181 votes. Interestingly most of Lasith’s votes have come from coupons.
His lead from Nirmal, who is forced down to the second slot, is a healthy 6014, which means Lasith’s followers have been quite busy even during the holiday season. Nirmal, meanwhile, received 6582 votes during the two weeks and his tally moves to 93167. Mohamed Najath of Zahira College has slowed down considerably as his total reaches 58825 after receiving 2269 combined votes.
The only change that occurred during the end of two weeks is the progress of Mohamed Rifaz of Presidents College Kotte from tenth to ninth, which caused the slide down of a place to one-time leader Lakshina Rodrigo of St. Peter’s College. The full list was pruned down to the Top 20 with the beginning of April and the list will be further cut down to 15 by May. By end of May, it will be shortlisted to the Top 10.
Pulitha Yasas Sri Sarathchandra of Sri Sumangala College Panadura continues to dominate the Emerging Schools category while the International Schools category is still led by Shimraz Shahil of Alethea International School. Important
Coupons of the competition will be published in the Sunday Times, the two English dailies, the Daily Mirror and Dailyft, and the two Sinhala dailies, Daily Lankadeepa and Ada. Coupons will run for 26 weeks with the deadline set for the week beginning on July 2. Readers could vote for their favourite schoolboy cricketer and take them to the winning post during that period.
Online voting could be done through Dialog Axiata’s digital online voting system Portal to vote for the Most Popular Cricketer via www.dialog.lk/cricket. The Counts of week’s 14 and 15 of the digital voting was monitored and approved by auditors Pricewaterhouse Cooper.