Sri Lanka are cricket’s team who keep on giving

There is no loneliness in being a long distance Sri Lanka fan. At Kardinia Park on Sunday, surely not even 407 among the 16,407 who turned up to watch the opening match of the men’s T20 World Cup were there to support Namibia. When the game was over there might have been as few as 47 left to see the United Arab Emirates take on the Netherlands, and not only because a frosty spring evening had descended on Geelong.

The crowd would have lurched through a slew of feelings during and after the Namibians’ jolting win, but loneliness would not have been among them. There were thousands of shoulders to cry on, and to be cried on. And the Papare Band Melbourne, Sri Lankans all, of course, were there to apply balm to stung souls.

Of the Sri Lankan diaspora, estimated at more than 2-million spread around the world, 465,000 are in India, Australia and the United Kingdom – countries where Lankans are able to see their team in the flesh with semi-satisfying frequency. Another 1.63-million are in 25 countries whose cricket boards are associate members of the ICC. That’s the rest of the 2-million, and a few thousand more to spare.

Being able to play or watch cricket, or just know that its within reach, wouldn’t be uppermost in Sri Lankans’ reasons for leaving. But it can’t hurt to know that whatever else they have to forsake – hoppers, arrack, warmth, family, friends, living while brown in a part of the world where brownness comes standard – the game will be there to take the edge off the foreignness. Wherever it is that they end up, perhaps all that is left of home in their new reality is cricket. You might not be able to watch Sri Lanka play if you are in, say, Cyprus. But you will be able to hear bat on ball. Almost half of Australia’s Sri Lankan migrants live in Melbourne, 80km up the motorway from Geelong.

In 1996 Sri Lanka fans had their hearts warmed and their minds dazzled by the deeds of Sanath Jayasuriya, Aravinda de Silva, Arjuna Ranatunga, Chaminda Vaas, Pramodya Wickramasinghe and Muttiah Muralitharan. Then came Kumar Sangakkara, Mahela Jayawardene and Lasith Malinga to keep the dazzling warmth alive. Sri Lanka reached the final in 2007 and 2011, but lost both times. In the T20 version they went down in the final in 2009 and 2012 and won it in 2014.

There have been swings and roundabouts, but until last year’s T20 World Cup they hadn’t had to qualify for the business end of a global tournament since the inaugural World Cup in 1979. And there Sri Lanka were in Geelong, scrapping it out with teams who had never beaten them in nine previous ODI and T20I meetings to nail down a place in the second round of the T20 World Cup.

Ignominy loomed when they lost to Namibia, but was averted with wins over the United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands. That, mind, on the back of winning the Asia Cup in the UAE in September, a triumph achieved in the throes of mass protests at home over rampant inflation and energy shortages that led to a change of government and were quelled in a brutal crackdown.