DEIFIED AND DAMNED: CRICKET, FAITH AND THE MOB

“CRICKET A RELIGION”; A DANGEROUS DELUSION

- By KKS PERERA

“We are not sure exactly why, but cricket is like a religion here.” So wrote W. Lewis Amselem, Chargé d’Affaires of the US Embassy in Colombo, in a cable to Washington on September 13, 2002, logged in the WikiLeaks database. The observation was made in passing, almost as an aside, yet it captured something profound about the subcontinent’s relationship with a bat-and-ball game that has long ceased to be merely a sport.

Religion, at its core, is a system of beliefs, practices, and moral codes centred on the sacred, divine, or supernatural, through which people seek meaning, purpose, and connection to something greater than themselves. Cricket, by any honest definition, is a sport. Yet in much of South Asia, it has dangerously assumed the character of a religion, and the consequences are deeply damaging.

Cricket's Fanaticism Exposed

Compounding all of this is the sorry state of cricket’s administration in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka Cricket[SLC] has long functioned less as a cricket board than as a political machine.

At the centre of its alleged corruption is the formation of fictitious, non-cricket-playing clubs whose sole purpose is to manufacture votes, electing and re-clecting favoured office bearers who reward their backers with generous financial inducements. Observers say that these operators shrewdly cultivate influential politicians, ensuring those in authority look the other way while the manipulation continues. Genuine cricket lovers of proven ability have been repeatedly out-manoeuvred at elections, defeated not on merit but by the organised votes of bookmakers and businessmen who see cricket not as a sport to be nurtured, but as a platform to be exploited. That such people govern the sport that once united a war-torn nation is not merely corrupt, it is a profound betrayal of everything Sri Lankan cricket once stood for.