Cricket unites fractured island

By Amantha Perera

IPS: Twenty-year-old Veethirasa Winston is planning his schedule meticulously for the next few weeks, making sure he keeps his diary free on days when Sri Lanka’s national team takes the cricket field.

“I have to, otherwise I will miss out on the big event,” he told IPS.

The big event is the 2011 Cricket World Cup that this island-nation is co- hosting with neighbouring India and Bangladesh from 19 February  to 2 April.

The Sri Lankan team is ranked among the best, and their countrymen’s eyes are on them. “The game is on and we are loving it,” said Winston, who belongs to the Tamil minority from Sri Lanka’s Northern Province.

Young and old alike throughout the country share Winston’s enthusiasm. “This is something that everyone has been looking forward to, no one wants to miss out supporting the Sri Lanka team,” said 22-year-old Indika Goonathileke who lives in a Colombo suburb and belongs to the majority Sinhala community.

Winston lives in Jaffna, the centre of a region devastated by over two-and-a- half decades of war that ended only in 2009. Even now, outsiders are still barred from some parts of the region.

The war killed over 70,000, maimed and injured thousands of others and displaced millions more. It also created a wide chasm between Sri Lanka’s two main communities, the majority Sinhalese and the Tamils.

The war may have ended almost two years ago with the defeat of the separatist Tamil Tigers, but the two communities on the ground still feel nervous about each other.

Not so when they watch cricket, which some have likened to a common faith. “It is almost a religion,” Roshan Abeysinghe, an international commentator, told IPS.

Even when the war was at its worst, cricket would cut through racial and ethnic divisions. In areas they controlled, the Tigers banned music, books and other forms of entertainment from the south, but no so such restrictions extended to cricket.

Even Tiger cadres used to watch matches telecast over national television they would otherwise have shunned.

“Even when the LTTE (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) was in control, it was the same. I remember, the LTTE used to organise cricket matches,” Thambirajah Gurukularaja, a 60-year-old resident of the northern Wanni region, told IPS. That region was under the Tigers’ control for over a decade till 2009.

“The people know the game. They are watching the World Cup,” said the grandfather who lived in the region through the long conflict.

“People in Wanni have been interested in cricket for a long time, war or no war. Cricket was something different,” he said.

The end of the conflict and the slow return of some semblance of normalcy in the north have allowed youth like Winston to enjoy the game like everyone else in the country. The ethnic tensions and preferences that would otherwise set Tamils like him apart from other communities seem to vanish when it comes to cricket.

“We are all for Sri Lanka, we are going to win this cup,” Winston said.

The World Cup is cricket’s ultimate showpiece and is held every four years. The fan following has taken a tremendous boost, with the island’s team ranked one of the favourites to do well in the tournament.

“They are one of the teams with a chance,” Abeysinghe said.

Already there are signs that the country is galvanising behind the team. Roads are decked with giant posters and cut-outs of star players. Kids everywhere seem to be trying to imitate them playing street cricket. Large crowds can be seen gawking intently at TV screens on shop windows oblivious to everything else, especially when the national team is on the field.

Wasantha Fonseka, who makes bats for amateur cricketers, has upped his production by two fold. “If the team does well, everyone everywhere in Sri Lanka will play cricket,” said the bat maker who makes his wares on the side of the rail track just south of Colombo.

Fonseka has firsthand experience on how high cricket fever can go in this island of just over 21 million. In 1996 he ran out of bats in his workshop as the World Cup wound to an end.

“What bats? I could not even find a piece of square wood in my workshop,” Fonseka said, as he watched an assistant laying down the new bats to be dried next to the rail track. In 1996, the last time Sri Lanka co-hosted the World Cup, its cricket team won the Cup.

The 1996 triumph has not disappeared from fans’ memories. The year had gotten off to a rotten start when the commercial hub of the capital Colombo was attacked by the Tamil Tigers in January, less two months before the tournament was to start.

The attack prompted two teams, Australia and the West Indies, to pull out of matches in the island, citing security fears. Cricket fans here were mortified. The national team’s eventual victory over the Australians in the final was like a soothing balm to the cricket mad Sri Lankan psyche.

“Even we followed that tournament,” Gurukularaja said. At that time, the war was entering its most deadly period as guerrilla attacks were reinforced by conventional confrontations involving large numbers of combatants.

There is world difference between 1996 and today. But the one constant is cricket, the one game that unites this island, no matter what.