Sri Lanka’s 136-year cricket rivalry stops for tea but never for war

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The national cricket team just advanced to the World Cup quarterfinals, but last weekend, it was a high-school cricket match that brought this capital city to a standstill. The three-day faceoff between Royal College and S. Thomas College is the biggest of Sri Lanka’s big matches, akin to homecoming football games, and this year marks the 136th anniversary of its start. 

The two all-boys schools are among the oldest in the country, and their big match has been played every year since 1879, when Colombo was a sleepy outpost of the British Empire. Only Britain’s Eton and Harrow schools have a longer-standing cricket rivalry, but people here like to remind visitors that though Sri Lanka only recently emerged from more than three decades of bloody civil war, their big match was never interrupted by wars, as Britain’s was.

“This is our NCAA tournament. This is as big as it gets,” said Shanaka Amarasinghe, host of a popular weekly radio sportscast. “All the big players are watching.”

Midday traffic across the center of the city slowed to a snail’s pace last Wednesday as Royal’s more than 8,000 students, along with its teachers and alumni, raucously paraded down a major thoroughfare to the beats of drums and the boom of brass bands. They inched south by the truckload, waving blue-and-yellow flags, while S. Thomas’ parade headed north toward them with blue-and-black ones, led by a bejeweled elephant. 

Both schools are incubators of Sri Lankan political power. S. Thomas, which uses the unusual abbreviation S. for “Saint” instead of St., is a private Anglican school that has produced four prime ministers, and Royal, run by the government, draws from an exclusive catchment area in neighborhoods that are home to top politicians and businesspeople. This year’s big match was imbued with even greater political significance because Sri Lanka’s new prime minister, Ranil Wickremasinghe, attended the match on Sunday, and many of his newly appointed Cabinet ministers are graduates of Royal College.

“I’ve heard different numbers for exactly how many Cabinet ministers are from Royal,” said Amarasinghe, an alumnus of S. Thomas. “But our prime minster is a Royalist, and he’s brought many of his fellow old boys along.”

Shehan Karunatilaka, a former Thomian who recently published an acclaimed work of fiction based on Sri Lankan cricket culture, was one of many who returned to Colombo from overseas for this particular weekend. Expatriate old boys, or alumni, of the two schools often plan annual visits to coincide with the match. But he found himself disappointed by what he saw as a dampened atmosphere this year. “Maybe it was all the rain this weekend, but I think it’s become tamer,” he said. “There’s a lot more security these days.”

To an uninitiated onlooker, however, the mood at the Singhalese Sports Club grounds seemed anything but tame. From bleachers on all sides of the circular field, music — live and blasted through speakers — created an incessant cacophony. If a ball was hit well or a wicket was taken, what cheers there were from the distracted crowd were inaudible. To one side, students from both schools formed an amorphous mass, dressed in white straw cowboy hats bearing ribbons in their school colors. Periodically, they dispatched classmates to run around the field’s perimeter waving flags bigger than them.

But the timeless draw of the sporting event came not from the cricket ground or the cheering students but from the camaraderie among the older crowd: The big match is, above all, a booze-fueled high-school reunion. Much of the bleachers are divided into invitation-only tents set up by different alumni associations. While cheap beer is available from vendors stationed around the grounds, the drink of choice here is arrack, a coconut-based liquor doled out in plastic cups. Old friends delighted in pouring it down one another’s throats. 

On the second day of the match, while the heat and humidity reached sauna levels, hundreds of middle-aged Royalists and Thomians partied in the 41-year-old Colts tent, which belongs to an elite club of old boys. Slowly whirring fans spritzed the inebriated with cool mist as they boogied to a live band playing Sinhalese papare music. Mentholated cigarette smoke filled the air. Like almost everywhere else in the stadium, barely a woman was in sight. These were, at least in the blur of the moment, the kind of men who jokingly referred to women as “the female species.”

Outside the tent, the current finance minister, Ravi Karunanayake, dressed in a Royal College polo shirt and jeans, spoke with journalists. A member of his coterie proffered his take on the spirit of the big match. “This is what we say each year — win or lose, we booze,” he said.

This year, however, winning or losing wasn’t an option. A breeze coming in from the nearby Indian Ocean slowly pushed towering, pregnant stormclouds toward the grounds. The umpires conferred with one another, cupping their hands over each other’s ears to be heard over the din, occasionally pointing their hats at the clouds. A field crew scrambled to unfurl a succession of tarps over the pitch.

After a full day of rain, the umpires declared the match a draw the next afternoon. Meanwhile, the party blared on in the Colts tent, and the smell of wet grass mixed with curry and cannabis, creating an intoxicating, breathable brew.

One man noticed a good friend of his standing on the opposite side of the tent and called over to him. “Does it look like there’s a match going on?” he shouted.

“No!” came the reply. “And who the f--- cares?”