Chanaka Fonseka
In January 2018, Sri Lanka Cricket’s then-president visited a large plot of vacant land near Sri Lanka’s northern city of Jaffna, and pledged to build a cricket stadium there. Among the headline-grabbing proposals tossed into the sky at this media-whirlwind was the notion that Jaffna could be developed into a “sports city”.
Jaffna is no stranger to grand pronouncements, of course. It was the largest urban centre to have been ensnared in Sri Lanka’s civil war, and suffered untold privations through almost 30 years. Because of this history, it has more recently become fashionable to speak of it as a place that must be developed, if not quite appeased. SLC, which may be viewed as an offshoot of Sri Lanka’s politics, has tended to treat the city as a good-PR factory, announcing various schemes to uplift cricket in the region while cameras are turned on, before largely forgetting the north exists when they are not. Ten years after the end of the war, SLC’s sporadic bursts of attention have had little tangible benefit. There is only one ground with a turf pitch in the entire northern province. In a city whose zeal for cricket had survived a decades-long war and has a history stretching more than 100 years, many cricketers continue to play on inferior surfaces, with sub-standard equipment…