In a tournament in great health, 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 with the games.
Although the LPL had been launched in the depths of a Covid 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 elswehere 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 disapora, had felt a connection.
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), who mostly specialise in cricket broadcasts.
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 milllion, roughly the same as the city of Mumbai. And while organisers had been prepared for the challenges of the Covid-lockdown 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.
Andrew Fidel Fernando is a senior writer at ESPNcricinfo. @afidelf