Rivals, equals

"I just can't see how umpire Hair can be calling no-ball here," the commentator says. Tony Greig had a way of being on air at every moment of significance for Sri Lankan cricket. This moment, while the greatest Test-match crowd the motley outfit of bankers and insurance peddlers had ever played for watched on, was a big one. Huge.

Australia has perhaps never given much heed to Sri Lanka's cricket. But all through the back end of the 1990s and beyond, Australian cricket was a Sri Lankan obsession. Men at corner shops spat at the mention of Mark Taylor or Steve Waugh. "They win a lot of matches, but do they know how to behave?" In daydreams, kids fantasised about hitting the winning runs against Australia. An Australian was taking cricket's most delicate art to dizzying new heights on pitches all around the world, but on Colombo streets, up in Kandy's hills, on the ramparts of Galle's fort, teenage legspinners scoffed at suggestions they were imitating Shane Warne. "P*** off. Warne? It's Mushtaq Ahmed who bowls like this."

It was one-sided national revulsion built upon on a litany of slights and trespasses, many of them merely perceived, others wholly imagined. Muttiah Muralitharan's travails at the MCG on Boxing Day in 1995 were the spark, fanned a few weeks later when Sri Lanka were accused of ball tampering against Australia in Perth. The umpires were supposedly biased. Aussie crowds were definitely getting stuck in. By the time Australia refused to play their World Cup match in Colombo in February, an inferno was raging. Sri Lanka was bomb-riddled. Sri Lankans were insecure.

The World Cup final in Lahore, with Arjuna Ranatunga tonking Warne over deep-square leg, and Greig booming, "these Sri Lankans are giving the Aussies a real hiding", was the sweetest possible outcome. Sri Lanka's great love for their cricket, and glowering dislike for Australia's, swirling together to make a cocktail so good it could barely be believed. Sri Lankans drank deep that night. They set off firecracker chains that sounded just like gunfire, and skyrockets that whistled overhead like artillery shells.

There was relief in the World Cup win. It felt like the Australian siege was broken. Yet it wasn't quite release. The rivalry would go on into 1999, when Murali was no-balled again, this time in Adelaide. "He was bowling legspin for the second half of that over, for heaven's sake! You can't chuck legspin. What's wrong with this Australian umpire?" Waugh's mental disintegration rubbed fans of a lot of nations the wrong way, but it often felt like it rubbed Sri Lankans the wrongest. "Just look at how our Sanath Jayasuriya celebrates a wicket compared to these Aussies. He just claps his hands and smiles."

In 2004, just before Sri Lanka were to tour, Australia Prime Minister John Howard waded into Sri Lankan ire. Asked if he felt Murali chucked, he had replied in the affirmative. "They proved it in Perth, too, with that thing." That thing was the second round of Murali's biomechanical tests, which showed that while his offbreak was within the legal limits, his doosra exceeded them. For a few months he shelved the variation while the University of Western Australia wired up and studied other bowlers. Almost every bowler chucks, scientists concluded. Even Glenn McGrath.

But was that the last of Australia's great offences? Through the middle of the last decade, Australia-loathing began to erode. Maybe it was because the antagonists of Sri Lanka's cricket adolescence had all begun to retire. Maybe it was because after the 2005 Ashes, Australia seemed vulnerable again. Even on the grandest stage, Sri Lanka's battles with Australia had lost their former edge. The board may have bleated complaints about Adam Gilchrist's squash ball-aided blitzkrieg in the 2007 World Cup, but fans across the country simply offered a "well played".

Then Sri Lanka began finally to win in Australia. Not in Tests just yet, but in ODIs. Australian crowds were still villains, but now they were the pantomime kind: to be tolerated, not be angered by. Their players still measure out the sledges, but boy, so do the Sri Lankans, when they want. If there is any misunderstood abuse, Sri Lanka have a wicketkeeper-batsman who will kindly translate, or even fix up the Australians' grammar. He'll appeal as opportunistically as an Ian Healy, then off the field, philosophise like Richie Benaud.

There are still rickety Sri Lankan boats carrying refugees headed to Australia, but the war has long ended, and Aussies are flying into the island in their droves too. They're spending thousands in Passekudah. They're climbing Sri Pada, making friends in the deep south, staying for weeks in Nuwara Eliya.

Maybe contempt for Australia didn't have much to do with chucking allegations and mental disintegration at all. Maybe it had been about how Sri Lankans view themselves. Their land is no longer the teardrop isle. The world is discovering that it is a gem. Greig will forever be adored there, but Sri Lankans no longer need him to fight their battles. They no longer need him to affirm their nation's wonders.

In January 2015, it is the Sri Lankan prime minister who is wading in. James Packer had proposed a $400 million casino resort in Colombo, even signing up Michael Clarke as an ambassador for the venture. This time the island is boycotting the Australians. "Who asked Packer to come?" Ranil Wickramasinghe asked. "Please don't come. Not in this lifetime."

Australia are the more fancied side for their Group A clash by far. They have the form bowlers; the more forbidding top order. But Sri Lanka will nonetheless enter the SCG undaunted - not just because they have won more away matches against Australia than they have lost this decade, nor because of their excellent recent record at the ground. They will be unfazed because there is no chip on their shoulder now. There are no more trumped-up affronts. In matters of resources, the cricket bodies and nations may still be far apart, but in spirit, at least, the teams will play on Sunday as equals.