Sri Lanka Club Cricket: The Colombo Clubs

In most cricket countries the unit of the domestic game is a place: a state, a county, a province. In Sri Lanka it is a club, and usually a club within about four miles of the Colombo seafront. The club owns its ground, keeps its own membership, runs its own bar and fields the first-class side that carries its name. Several of them have grounds good enough to have staged Test cricket. None of them represents a region in any meaningful sense.

That arrangement is older than the national team by more than a century, and it explains a great deal about the shape of Sri Lankan cricket — the depth of spin bowling, the shortage of fast bowlers reared on hard work, the concentration of talent in one city, and the durability of a domestic structure that almost every senior figure in the game has at some point called too big.

This page is about how the clubs came to exist, what they have competed for, and why an argument about their number has run for decades without resolving. The wider institutional picture is in the guide to how Sri Lankan cricket is organised.

The 1832 notice

Organised cricket in Colombo predates almost everything else about the game in Asia. In September 1832 a notice in the Colombo Journal invited gentlemen interested in forming a cricket club to come forward, and the Colombo Cricket Club was the result. It lapsed, was revived in the 1860s, and — like the colonial institutions around it — remained European in membership until well into the twentieth century, opening up only in the 1960s.

For most of the nineteenth century that was the pattern: cricket belonged to planters, civil servants, garrison officers and the schools that served them. What changed the game was not the arrival of a governing body but the founding of clubs by Ceylonese communities who were not going to be admitted to the European ones. The earliest origins of the game on the island are traced in the guide to the origin of cricket in Sri Lanka.

Clubs founded along community lines

The clubs that still dominate the first-class competition were nearly all founded in a single generation, between the 1870s and the First World War, and most were founded to serve a specific community.

Club	Founded	Origin
Colombo Cricket Club	1832, revived 1860s	The original European club
Colts Cricket Club	1873, reorganised 1886	Officially Colombo Colts
Nondescripts Cricket Club	1888	Deliberately open to all, hence the name
Bloomfield Cricket and Athletic Club	1892	Cinnamon Gardens, on Reid Avenue opposite Royal College
Sinhalese Sports Club	27 March 1899	Founded for the Sinhalese community
Tamil Union Cricket and Athletic Club	2 December 1899	Formed by the amalgamation of earlier clubs, one of them Lanka Sports Club, founded 1895 at Price Park
Moors Sports Club	1908	Founded by members of the Colombo Grand Mosque, in Pettah

The Nondescripts case is the revealing one. Its name was chosen precisely because the club refused a communal label at a time when the Sinhalese Sports Club, Tamil Union and Moors all carried one. That was an unusual position in 1888 and it says something about the social function these clubs performed: they were not simply places to play, they were where a community's professional class met.

Every one of them long ago opened its membership, and the ethnic names now describe founders rather than dressing rooms. But the founding logic left a permanent mark on the map. Because the clubs were built by communities concentrated in Colombo, the first-class game was concentrated in Colombo, and it still is. The cost of that concentration is examined in the guide to cricket in Colombo.

The trophy that kept changing its name

A properly structured inter-club first-class competition arrived in 1937. Its name has changed roughly every time its funding did.

• 1937 onwards: the Daily News Trophy, named for the newspaper that backed it.
• 1950-51: the P Saravanamuttu Trophy, renamed for Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, the administrator whose name the Tamil Union ground also carries.
• 1985-86: the Lakspray Trophy, when commercial sponsorship arrived.
• Later in the 1980s and 1990s: the Sara Trophy, reverting to the older name in abbreviated form.
• 1998-99 onwards: the Premier Trophy, the title it has broadly kept.

Sinhalese Sports Club has won it more often than anyone else, by a wide margin, with a total past thirty titles. Colts, Nondescripts, Tamil Union, Bloomfield and Moors have all had periods on top. The competition's current shape, including its limited-overs companion tournaments, is set out in the guide to Sri Lankan domestic first-class cricket.

The naming history is not a trivia list. It records the competition's fundamental problem: it has never had an independent commercial identity strong enough to survive its sponsors, and it has always depended on either a newspaper, a company or the board.

Club grounds that staged Test cricket

The clearest evidence of how central the clubs were is that Sri Lanka's international cricket began on their property.

The P Sara Oval, home of Tamil Union, hosted the country's inaugural Test in February 1982 against England, and three years later staged Sri Lanka's first Test victory, against India. It is a small ground, part low stands and part grass bank, and its ivy-covered scoreboard is the most photographed object in Sri Lankan cricket. Don Bradman's Australians stopped there in 1948 on the way to England. The Oval held international cricket regularly until the mid-1990s, then went almost a decade without a Test before hosting an Australia-Pakistan match played there on neutral ground in 2002.

The Sinhalese Sports Club ground became the country's principal Test venue and, being on the same site as the offices of the governing body, the ground where administration and cricket sit closest together; it has its own guide at the SSC ground. Bloomfield's ground sits opposite Royal College in Cinnamon Gardens, which tells you how tightly the club and school worlds are packed into the same few streets. The purpose-built alternative arrived only with the R Premadasa Stadium, and its floodlights changed what the club grounds were needed for.

The practical consequence is that Sri Lankan first-class cricket is played on club squares, prepared by club groundstaff, to no single specification. That is the root of the pitch complaint discussed below.

How a schoolboy becomes a club cricketer

The clubs do not run academies in the way boards elsewhere do. They recruit, and they recruit from school cricket, which in Sri Lanka is unusually strong and unusually well watched. A boy who has played in a big match and made runs in the school season is known to club selectors before he has left, and the transition at seventeen or eighteen is direct: from a school first eleven into a club's second string or, if he is good enough, straight into the first-class side.

That has two effects. It makes the school system the real selection layer, which is why it receives the attention set out in the guide to the Sri Lankan school cricket system. And it means the club game absorbs a very large intake every year, because two dozen clubs each recruiting a handful of school leavers is a lot of contracts. How that intake is filtered at national age-group level is covered in the under-19 pathway.

The dilution argument

The standing criticism of Sri Lankan club cricket is straightforward: there are too many first-class teams for the size of the playing population, and the effect is to spread a limited number of good cricketers across a large number of ordinary sides.

The competition has been run with around twenty teams split into tiers, and senior figures in the game have repeatedly made the same point — that of the clubs playing at the top level, only five or six are genuinely strong, so a season contains a great many one-sided matches. A player can score heavily without ever facing a testing attack, and selectors then have to guess how much of the record means anything.

The second criticism concerns surfaces. Club grounds in and around Colombo tend to produce slow, turning pitches, and analysis of the Premier League's leading wicket-takers has found the top of the list dominated by finger spinners. That is a coherent system for producing spin bowlers, and Sri Lanka's record in that department is no accident, as the guide to the spin bowling tradition explains. It is a poor system for producing fast bowlers who have learned to bowl twenty overs in a day, and the difficulty of developing quick bowlers is the subject of the guide to Sri Lanka's fast bowling evolution.

The tiering itself was one answer to the first complaint. Splitting the Premier League into an upper and a lower tier, with movement between them, was meant to concentrate the strongest clubs into a smaller pool of matches that mattered while keeping the rest inside the first-class system. It reduced the number of mismatches at the top without reducing the number of teams overall, which is why the criticism kept being made in much the same terms after the split as before it.

Both criticisms have been made for decades, by former captains, coaches and administrators. They are not fringe views. What they have not produced is durable change.

Why the clubs have outlasted every reform

Provincial and regional competitions have been introduced in Sri Lanka more than once, and the logic each time was the same: fewer teams, better matches, a structure organised by geography rather than by nineteenth-century membership lists. None of them has displaced the club competition as the first-class championship.

The usual explanation is constitutional rather than cricketing. The clubs are members of the governing body and hold votes in it, which means any reform that reduces their number or their status has to be passed by the institutions it would demote. Add to that the fact that the clubs own the grounds, employ the groundstaff, hold the contracts and carry a century of history each, and the inertia is not mysterious.

There is also a case for them, which tends to get lost. The clubs give several hundred cricketers a year a competitive standard of cricket, they maintain the country's playing facilities out of their own membership income, and they have supplied essentially every Test cricketer Sri Lanka has ever picked. A restructuring that produced six strong provincial sides would also close a large number of doors.

Watching it, and where it sits now

Club cricket in Colombo is played largely on weekdays in front of very few people. There is generally no charge to watch, no scoreboard beyond the manual one, and a good chance of finding international players turning out between tours. For anyone in the city with an afternoon spare, it is the most unmediated cricket available, and the standard in the better fixtures is considerably higher than the setting implies.

Its position in the calendar, though, has weakened. The Lanka Premier League now takes the commercial attention and the television slot, and franchise cricket abroad takes the senior players for parts of the year. The club competition retains its formal role as the first-class championship and its historic role as the pathway from school cricket to the national side. Whether it can hold both while shrinking to a defensible size is the question the game has been putting off since the 1990s. For the broader context on how the pieces fit together, start from the cricket in Sri Lanka hub.

Sources and method

The founding dates and origins here come from the clubs' own published histories and from standard reference accounts of Ceylonese cricket; where a club's founding is recorded differently in different sources, the page gives the date its own club records. The lineage of the first-class trophy follows published season records of the competition under each of its names.

The account of the P Sara Oval's Test history rests on match records and ground histories. Title counts are stated in general terms rather than as a precise figure, because they change with each completed season and a fixed number would go stale.

The criticisms of the domestic structure are reported as criticisms: they reflect a long-running and well-documented argument among Sri Lankan players, coaches and administrators, and this page describes that argument rather than adjudicating it. The explanation for the clubs' survival is the widely offered one about voting membership of the governing body, and is presented as an explanation rather than a proven cause.