Most of the cricket addicts who visit Colombo for the first time are left awestruck with the club cricket culture the city boasts. Maitland Cresent area is like Mothijheel in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka where many major clubs of the country are located. Always bustling with sportsmen, enthusiasts and tourists the roads heading to the seven clubs in Colombo remain busy. However, since the terrorist bomb blasts in April this year, the situation has gone down slide.
On 21 April three churches around the island and as many luxury hotels in the Colombo were targeted during a series of coordinated terrorist suicide bombings. Later that day, there were smaller explosions at a housing complex in Dematagoda and a guest house in Dehiwala. The attack had killed at least 259 and left scores injured.
Following the incident the locals had limited their movements and the country has seen a big slump in number of tourists. The clubs that feature biggest names of Sri Lanka cricket get their major earning by renting the field and other club properties to local, corporate and cricket tourist groups coming from Europe, mostly England, but that also got hit badly.
Every English summer there is a trend of the English cricket enthusiasts visit Colombo with teams and play the game in the tropical climate of the island. But this time the story has been different.
A.Francke, manager cricket and grounds of Nondescripts Cricket Club [NCC] informed only bookings from renting out the ground in the club would bring on average around USD 6500 every month and the club office would have a tough time maintaining the bookings. But the situation is different now.
“We had bookings from six seven months ahead. But since the 21st [April], all reservations for the ground got cancelled up to now (end of July). There has been no single event. Only next month [August] we are having a few small events but all corporate events have been cancelled. Before the attack we were packed on all weekends of each month and there were booking even on weekdays,” informed Francke to Dhaka Tribune on Monday.
NCC is one of the well established clubs having a sports complex comprising tennis courts, swimming and other activities besides an international size cricket ground. This way the club has many doors to keep the revenue coming but not all the clubs are fortunate and have to rely only on the cricket ground.
“The clubs like Bloomfield, VRC and Colts don’t have other places for income but only the ground. In NCC we have swimming pool and other sporting events their helping the club to earn but for others [clubs] the time has become really tough,” said Francke who has spent most of his life serving the NCC.
For revival from the trauma the clubs at times took different initiatives and are still working on it. Francke explainied, “I took the phone to call people that have had events in our clubs in the previous months or years. But only a few were positive or had retained their bookings for events. The chief reason was those people or companies have gone into donating money to those who were affected by the blasts.”
