February 20, 2004

Sticky Wicket

The controversies in Australian cricket pale into insignificance when you look at Sri Lanka

Eric Ellis, Colombo

AS Australia's cricket champions take the field in Sri Lanka this week for a month long tour - probably Shane Warne’s first since his drugs ban - our heroes will likely be struck by how gorgeous the tropical island is and how warm and welcoming the locals are.

They’ll have been assured by their administrators that the civil war danger on the island has passed, that the feared Tamil Tiger rebels have shelved their guns and bombs, and Lankans of all persuasions are at last getting along.

And those administrators will be wrong. True, the Tigers are holding a tenuous ceasefire with the Colombo authorities but the same cannot be said for the nasty little war waged within the country’s own cricketing heirachy, that involves murder, corruption and dark political intrigues revolving around several of Sri Lanka’s leading political, sporting and business figures.

At the centre of this seething mess is Thilanga Sumathipala. He’s the president of Sri Lanka's cricket board and a director of the International Cricket Council, a 41 year-old wheeler-dealer with a penchant for loud jewellery who got rich from a chain of betting shops prosaically known as ‘turf accountants’ – the connection between cricket’s recent match-fixing scandals and sub-continental betting apparently not one made in Sri Lanka.

But Thilanga hasn’t had much time for cricket recently. That’s because he’s been in gaol, accused of abetting Dhammika Amarasinghe, the island’s nastiest standover man who's implicated in 28 murders. Thilanga is accused of helping Dhammika get a forged passport to travel to London for the 1999 World Cup. Problem for the prosecution is that their star witness - Dhammika - is dead, mysteriously gunned down in December a few days before he was to testify in the Thilanga case.

That’s not half of it. Thilanga is also the politically-appointed chairman of Sri Lanka’s biggest company, the state-owned Sri Lanka Telecom, and is now fielding attempts by the government to oust him from that post, as well as from the top cricket slot. Thilanga is known as the backroom king-maker of Sri Lankan politics, and it was his switch from President Chandrika Kumaratunga's People's Alliance to Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe's United National Party that delivered the PM-ship for Ranil, and the telecom gig for Thilanga. But Wickramasinghe is now being out-manouevred by the wily Chandrika, who mounted a presidential coup in November and has just called a snap poll for April 2, the island's third election in four years. Her political allies includes the only-Ferrari-on-the-island-driving former captain Aravind Da Silva (who himself once came under the match-fixing spotlight), and who has his eye on the cricket board, which may help explain part of Thilanga’s dilemma.

And then there's the mysterious $10,000 found in the hotel room of star batsman Marvan Attapattu, occasional captain of the one-day squad, during Sri Lanka’s recent draw against England in Kandy. Attapattu denies any wrong-doing as he is investigated (for the moment, anyway) by half-hearted ICC authorities.

All of which will largely be oblivious to our cossetted gladiators as they slug it out in Galle, Colombo and Kandy, protected by the matey mafia of the Oz cricketing establishment for whom politics - pace Zimbabwe - is about as welcome as Darrell Hair at a Muttiah Muralitharan curry night.

But as fans straggle to Sri Lanka - intriguingly, the first game was between Australia and Cricket Sri Lanka's (gaoled) President's XI - they may at least pause to wonder why the dressing room toilets don't flush, the infrastructure of the island's picturesque grounds is dysfunctional, and who are those burly men carrying bulging briefcases around the hotel.