On Thursday at the Lanka Premier League (LPL), Colombo Strikers played a knockout match in what is ostensibly their home venue.
Strikers had beaten their Eliminator opponents Kandy Falcons twice in the league stage and had in their ranks the likes of Rahmanullah Gurbaz (one of the T20 World Cup's star batters), New Zealand livewire Glenn Phillips, and three-time LPL-winning captain Thisara Perera.
The cheapest seats at the Khettarama cost SLR 200 (a little more than the cost of a loaf of bread), slightly better seats cost SLR 600 (about what a posh coffee might set you back), and very good seats cost around SLR 2000 (a fast-food burger meal). Pay these amounts, and you would not only get access to the evening game, in which Strikers featured, you'd also have been able to roll up to Galle Marvels vs Jaffna Kings, the top-two sides from the league stage, playing the afternoon Qualifier that would launch one of those sides to the final.
In a tournament in great health, the Khettarama would be brimming with 35,000 fans. Sri Lankan social media would be wriggling with debates, commentary and analysis. Potential sponsors would be clambering over each other to be associated.
In reality, no more than a smattering of spectators were in attendance, Falcons would continue to play without a sponsor, and though the most faithful devotees of Sri Lankan cricket were tuning in, there was little evidence that these matches were breaking through into the mainstream consciousness. On Saturday, when Kings played Falcons in a second Qualifier, which turned out to be a nail-biter, crowds and interest were only marginally better.
Although the LPL had been launched in the depths of a Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, there had been brightness to that first season. Perhaps the strictures imposed by the pandemic worked in its favour. The LPL had a captive audience, for one - Lankans stuck at home with little else to do. There wasn't much cricket going on elsewhere on the planet at the time, so fans overseas were also drawn in. Having to play at a single bio-secure venue was a bonus too - just one broadcast crew was required, even if costs to maintain the tournament bubble were substantial.
When the Jaffna franchise, called Stallions under the original ownership, won, it felt like a tournament that could grow. Jaffna fans are the toughest crowd in the country, for reasons that stretch far beyond sport. And yet many in the northern city, and some in the diaspora, had felt a connection.
By the next edition, the winning Stallions team had been terminated by Sri Lanka Cricket to the chagrin of those owners. No serious effort at building a fanbase in their home cities has been attempted since.
"Where organisers may point to some markers of growth, this, right now, is a league that is being out-competed by many others. The concurrent MLC in the USA has pulled the likes of Cummins, Rashid, Pooran, Pollard, Head, Maxwell and Boult - the kind of star list the LPL has never assembled across its five seasons"
Since then, the LPL has lurched from season to season, picking up new owners every time it rounds a corner on a new edition, each one stranger than the last. Take the Dambulla franchise, for example. In the inaugural tournament, the team was Dambulla Viiking, owned by Sachiin Joshi, who has since become more familiar to India's law enforcement agencies. Next year, it was Dambulla Giants, after Joshi divested. In 2022 and 2023, it was Dambulla Aura, owned by Aura Lanka, whose website claims the company is in everything from herbals to helicopters, but which has no products available for wide consumption by the Sri Lankan or any other market. In the approach to this year's tournament, they were Dambulla Thunders, until one of their owners was arrested just weeks before the tournament. Now it is Dambulla Sixers, owned by a whole different entity.
When you see company after company buying up these franchises, then ditching them just as fast while stadiums remain largely empty in a country in which cricket is indisputably the most popular sport, you start to wonder who this tournament is actually for.
Organisers have touted broadcast numbers, year after year. But then why is there such horrendous turnover in franchise ownership? B-Love Kandy won last year's tournament, and yet those owners are not around now. The organisers have had to run the franchise.
We say "organisers" rather than Sri Lanka Cricket, because unusually for SLC, they have allowed another entity to come in and run the LPL on their behalf. This is the Innovative Production Group (IPG), which mostly specialises in cricket broadcast.
SLC and IPG face substantial economic headwinds, of course. They are operating in a market that is tiny by South Asian standards - Sri Lanka's population of 22 million, roughly the same as the city of Mumbai. And while the organisers had been prepared for the challenges of the Covid era, they could not have foreseen the tanking of Sri Lanka's economy in late 2021 and 2022. Significantly less wealth in the country means fans are loathe to part with what little disposable income remains month-to-month, and corporates are cautious with marketing budgets.
But even with these allowances and caveats, the LPL is floundering. Mainly this is down to one of SLC's greatest sins - the board has never sought to meaningfully spread cricket into the provinces it claims to represent. If you grow up playing in Jaffna, Dambulla, or even Kandy, you have no serious local team to represent. You have to come to Colombo to play senior cricket. For most, this would involve leaving their family, finding a job, and a new support network, which in turn means that fans in these cities never really have the opportunity to rally behind local players, as they might at the Big Bash League, or the Caribbean Premier League, or the Pakistan Super League.
Where organisers may point to some markers of growth, this, right now, is a league that is being out-competed by many others. The concurrent Major League Cricket in the USA has pulled the likes of Pat Cummins, Rashid Khan, Nicholas Pooran, Kieron Pollard, Travis Head, Glenn Maxwell and Trent Boult - the kind of star list the LPL has never assembled across its five seasons.
This is a decent approximation of men's cricket in Sri Lanka at the moment. SLC officials have been at pains to suggest it is moving forward. In reality, Sri Lanka is being left behind by everyone else.