Looking Back: A Colombo Classic

I was 19 and spending the summer holidays in Colombo, Sri Lanka where my Father was working. 

At that age, you might think that spending five days watching cricket wouldn’t have been high on my agenda, but I’d been offered free tickets for the game courtesy of a director of the sponsors, Keells.

So the opportunity to watch a Test match between one of the top teams, Australia, and the emerging Sri Lankans was not to be missed.

The weather was typical of August in Colombo– hot and dry, and I was rather grateful for the shade of the Keells stand at the Sinhalese Sports Club.  A visit twelve months later to see the Indians touring saw me sat out on the grass and burned to a crisp by the close of play (though I suspect the bottle of Southern Comfort helped me through the day).

Both teams had an interesting mixture of veterans and young upstarts.  The Sri Lankans were captained by Arjuna Ranatunga, now chairman of Sri Lanka Cricket, and included the likes of Champaka Ramanayake, Aravinda DeSilva, and Asanka Gurusinha.  Making his debut was a 23 year-old wicketkeeper named Romesh Kaluwitherana.

There was no Muttiah Muralitharan - he wouldn't make his Test debut until the second match of the series - but it was the forerunner of a side that would gradually come to compete with the best at Test level.

For the Australians, Allan Border led, along with stalwarts Greg Matthews and David Boon and the perpetually unlucky Mike Whitney.   It was a tour that saw the last of Tom Moody’s appearances as a Test player, and the emergence of a tyro named Shane Warne prior to his big breakthrough in the Caribbean later that year.

The crowd was humming as Sri Lanka won the toss and put the tourists in.  They were all abuzz some few overs later when Ramanayake dismissed Moody in single figures, but then settled in to watch some gritty batting from Mark Taylor and Boon.

Immediately after lunch, things spiced up.  Medium pacer Chandika Hathurasingha ripped out the middle order, and along with Ramanayake had the crowd, even in the more genteel surroundings of the sponsors stand, rather animated.

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