There’s still about a day before the next game in Sri Lanka, the match-up with a bullish India, maybe just enough time for me to quickly recount my experiences of the previous tour to Sri Lanka in 2003.
Test in Kandy
Being in Sri Lanka for the tour was entirely coincidental. I had been travelling around India looking at temples, a journey that was to stretch from the Himalayas to the southern tip of the peninsula, from the west coast to the east. (I’d love to write about it one day, but who has the time.) As you can imagine, such a pilgrimage takes quite a long while, and your basic 6-month tourist visa wasn’t going to cut it, so we popped over to Sri Lanka to renew our visas.
Sri Lanka however is a lovely place, so even though the visit was ostensibly a diversion, we had a great time drinking tea, relaxing and enjoying not being in India for a couple of weeks. And by chance we arrived just after the first test (missing Fleming’s 274, which I understand wasn’t broadcast at all in New Zealand, so we all missed it).
Colombo was a bit urgh though. We stayed at the YMCA (coz we’re such budget travellers), where the staff were drunk, I had to sleep on a filthy mattress and the fan blew the light fitting into the wall constantly. So we got out of there as fast as we could and headed to Kandy in the hills. Where, by chance, the second test was in progress. Once we were settled in, we managed to get to the stadium to see the last couple of days (pretty rubbish really, though we did see Vettori get wiped out in a collision with Atapattu).
Kandy is a beautiful venue, surrounded by hills with a rickety old stand from which flocks swallows fly throughout the day. I don’t know why more cricket isn’t played there. I think the game was even stopped for a while for a dog on the field.
The game staggered to a draw, but Fleming was entitled to a post-match shot suggesting Tillakaratne wasn’t trying hard enough.
ODI series
Next up was the tri-series with Pakistan, entirely held in Dambulla. We attended the first two New Zealand games of the series.
Dambulla is a smart enough venue, but has none of the character of Kandy. The town is a dustbowl and the ground has nothing to recommend it. Still, the main stand allows a good view of the action, and that’s what matters.
We arrived for the first of our games a few overs in, where we were greeted by a peculiar scorecard showing the first 5 Pakistan batsmen having 0 – Hafeez, Iqbal and Youhanna out without scoring, with neither Umar or Khan having opened their accounts (the 5 runs at that stage were all extras). Shane Bond ended with 2/7, but buggered his back.
Our closest encounter with the team came after that match as we waited for a bus to take us back to Kandy. While we stood on the dusty street we saw this tall guy with black shorts wandering about looking lost. While we were muttering “who is that?” to each other, he was collected by an official. I’d been away from home for several years and was barely familiar with the team, so it wasn’t until much later that I worked out it was Kyle Mills.
Transport in Sri Lanka is completely shite by the way. I still don’t quite know how we managed to get to and from Dambulla twice. There are hardly any buses and they don’t seem to have regular stopping points. They are always packed to the ceiling and have tiny seats installed. One of our buses broke down in the middle of nowhere, leaving us to hitch a ride on the next overloaded rattletrap we could catch.
The trains aren’t any better. After the next match we moved from Kandy to Haputale up in the mountains. Standing room only on the train. Fun for a while but agony by the end of the journey.
We followed the rest of the round robin games in Haputale on TV along with the staff, a bunch of young guys and an older Muslim man. The young guys were well into the cricket and confident that Sri Lanka were going to win. The second to last qualifying match was Sri Lanka versus New Zealand and so confident were they that Sri Lanka would carry it, they laid a bet with us with a bottle of ginger ale as the stakes. The game was close run, with 10 runs needed by Sri Lanka off the last two overs, but when Styris took the last wicket we heard a pop and fizz from the other room as the guys popped open our prize ginger ale before bringing it in for us. We then all went outside and played ‘one-hand, one-bounce’ with a piece of wood and a ball made up of rolled up tape.
The last game was between Pakistan and New Zealand. NZ had already done enough to qualify for the final, but the outcome of this match would determine whether Pakistan or Sri Lanka would go through. Sensibly, any Sri Lankan would be rooting for New Zealand in this game. However, the Muslim Sri Lankan staff member was quite chuffed when Pakistan won. This is an attitude I’d come across before in South Asia amongst certain Muslims, who will support Pakistan over their home country. Very strange.
Final
So New Zealand had made the final. We had our new visas so we were heading back to Colombo for our flight back to India.
The final was held on the day before we left. Unfortunately our budget here didn’t extend to a hotel with a TV we could watch. Our solution to this problem was to watch the game at Colombo’s Cricket Club Cafe. Now, since our budget didn’t extend to TV access, it could hardly cover a full day’s drinks at an up-market cafe. So in a fairly shameful exercise in thrift, we nursed one glass of beer each for the whole day.
It was all worth it in the end as New Zealand won the series, making it a successful tour of Sri Lanka. Much as our holiday was.
