ABSTRACT
In 2011 the Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka wrote an article, which was essentially an ‘everything-stops-for-cricket’ essay about the purportedly redeeming properties of the game in contemporary Sri Lankan life. In the course of the article he observed that: Cricket has been a distraction of choice for Sri Lanka since our days of brewing tea for the empire. In 1946, several of the island’s leading cricket clubs – the Sinhalese Sports Club, the Tamil Union Cricket and Athletic Club and the Kandy Sports Club – opened their membership to all communities. Referring to incidents in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Michael Roberts argued, first of all, that the predominant Western response was effectively to depoliticise the bombers and render them instead as ‘mindless’ and ‘fanatics’. The prospect of bringing big-time international cricket to the island was one factor that attracted commercial sponsors.
