A beating heart that's pumping cash

"Why", Mr Perera, my rickshaw driver, asked this morning, "do you go to match so early?" "Well, the match is kind of my job", I replied sheepishly. And an amazing number of people could have said the same. Big cricket matches provide work for a small army.

First the players. Contracted by their board, most now make a decent living. Justin Langer was charged with bringing the game into disrepute yesterday. If found guilty, he could have lost half his match fee - or a tidy Australian $5,500. That's on top of his annual retainer. And to support 15 players here Australia have nine back-up staff: coach, assistant coach, strength-and-conditioning coach, team manager, security manager, media manager, computer analyst, physio, and massage therapist. Thirty years ago most teams had a manager and a bag-man-cum-scorer.

The new ICC panel of elite umpires means most officials are now full-timers. Steve Bucknor is; his colleague standing here, David Orchard, has just been dropped. (Intriguingly, Orchard now seems to be giving more lbws. Perhaps umpires make more conservative calls when their career hangs on it.) Then there is a third umpire, a fourth umpire and a match referee, all in white shirts telling us to "Fly Emirates".

Move from the officials' room in the stadium's bowels to the eyrie-like and well-filled press box. There are 21 print journalists here today, from Sri Lanka, Australia, India and the UK. Newspapers, agencies, magazines, websites, even companies providing text messages for mobiles - all want to know about Justin Langer's cramp or Simon Katich's comeback. The first copy was filed, for the first editions of the Aussie papers, within minutes of the start.

Above the tapping laptops, Jim Maxwell from the ABC is perched on a gantry, providing radio reports for Australian stations and World Service listeners waking in England or going to bed in New Zealand.

And around the ground there are Singer-sponsored TV technicians, looking after the tellies in the pricier stands; a small army of groundstaff (sponsored by Sri Lankan telecoms company Mobitel); four or five different sets of caterers; plenty of police; board-funded bouncers; and hyper-efficient telephone engineers with handfuls of screwdrivers.

There are also people working in 13 food and drink concessions or the Sri Lanka cricket shop, the tour-group leaders, the scoreboard operators, the scorers, and Percy, the Sri Lankan cheerleader (also sponsored) ...

That adds up to a lot of wages. And, directly or indirectly, most of this whole army are paid by TV companies. National boards raise most of their cash auctioning TV rights. Other cricket people are paid by sponsors. Would big business be interested if they weren't guaranteed exposure on the world's TV screens?

The Ten Sports TV studio at the Commentary Box End of the SSC is like a beating heart, pumping cash in all directions. Ten Sports, owned by the Sharjah-based Bukhatir Investments, are beaming pictures from Colombo across the subcontinent, to the Middle East and to the USA. Here they are employing 35. And year-round cricket has bred a travelling troupe of TV people, many shifting from jobs in one country to another, seldom short of work. Employees range from riggers to Geoff Lawson and Thommo, two of the front men here.

In fact, the number of people working at the sparsely-attended SSC isn't that much smaller than the number watching. Big cricket matches are big business. Which raises the question: is this a business within a game or a game within a business? Who wins out when the two conflict? TV wants more international cricket. Players by and large do not. It will interesting to see who wins out.