As such, it would be foolish to expect this caretaker committee to achieve anything more than to make sure that the furniture and stationery at SLC is not pilfered before the 20 May election and the election itself is free from the influence of local cricketing Macoutes.

All in all, the press conference was an innocuous affair where little of substance was discussed. Ironically, that little substance was provided by the sole non-committee member present, Aravinda de Silva. De Silva was attending the briefing in his capacity as the Chairman of SLC’s Cricket Committee.

New domestic tournament format

Aravinda de Silva shared the thinking of his committee regarding the premier domestic tournament format. From his comments, it could be gleaned that:

1. The existing 26 teams will not be reduced, at least in the short-term

2. Cricket Committee recognises that a drastic reduction in the number of teams would shut out the path of many aspiring cricketers to continue playing once they are out of school

3. Cricket Committee understands that cricketers who seek to play club and league cricket in Australia and England need to play a minimum of five 1st Class matches to qualify.

4. The 26 teams will play a three-day tournament (1st Class) followed by a four-day provincial tournament and national call-ups would be based on provincial level performance.

5. If national selections will be based on performance in provincial competition, the new format will also have to accommodate one-day and T20 provincial tournaments as well.

All of the above is reasonable and recognises the realities of Sri Lanka and it was most gratifying to hear de Silva’s silence on oft repeated gratuitous references to domestic structures of other nations. Maybe the Cricket Committee has finally realised that Sri Lanka’s cricket landscape is unique and imposing incompatible foreign formats is unlikely to prove beneficial and maybe do more harm than good.

Maybe.

I say maybe because in spite of de Silva’s willingness to co-opt the existing club format, he still insists on imposing a foreign format to the top of Sri Lanka’s tournament pyramid.

Provincial cricket has never taken root in Sri Lanka for the simple reason that Sri Lankans rarely identify themselves in the provincial context. When asked where they are from, how many times do we hear a person answer that they are from province A, B or C? Hardly to never would be my guess. At the political level, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which calls for the devolution of certain powers to provinces has been gathering constitutional dust going on 34 years.

SLC’s membership has never accepted the validity, efficacy, and the legitimacy of provincial tournaments. Considering that reality, Cricket Committee’s insistence on changing Sri Lanka’s cricket nomenclature is baffling.

A hybrid format will serve the same purpose

Cricket Committee’s desire to strengthen Sri Lanka’s domestic tournament format can be achieved without generating hostility from SLC’s membership and creating more institutional instability by tweaking the existing club format.

Following is a simple way to get about the task.

At the end of the three-day club tournament, pick the ten top teams and group them into two.

Then, play a four-day tournament between those ten teams.

Repeat the process at the one-day and T20 level.

If players who are in contention for future national selections are left out in the process, those players could be brought into the new formats as free agents. Free agency means that those players will be available to be picked up by any of the top ten teams. The details of the processes involved would be worked out by the parties involved.

This new format will not be provincial only in name for it is likely to meet most, if not all, of the objectives envisioned in the provincial set-up.

Most importantly, all that could be achieved without the destruction and intrusiveness of creating cricketing collective farms, for Cricket Committee’s envisioned clusterization of clubs is collectivization by other means.

If those who can insist on imposing an alien concept on SLC’s membership succeed, it is quite possible that the institution’s fragile structural foundations will not be able to absorb that intrusion without imploding.

No number of good intentions can justify that ending.