Underdogs no more

Ivo Bligh captained England's first team to play in Sri Lanka on Friday the 13th, October 1882. There was no bad luck that day - they won comfortably - but their fortune did not last: setting sail for Australia a few days later, they collided with a ship in mid-ocean and had to struggle back to Galle for repairs. Well over a century on and England - along with all other Test nations - are still leaving the island of Sri Lanka shamefaced.

Sri Lanka are cricket's biggest success story. Given Test status in 1981, they have overcome a civil war and political interference to become a top Test side, redefine one-day cricket and reach two World Cup finals, winning one.

Their short acclimatisation period makes a mockery of Bangladesh's Test status. It also makes a mockery of Kapil Dev, who captained India in Sri Lanka's first Test win in 1985 and said: "Sri Lanka will never win a Test outside her shores."

How they got to that stage is a fascinating story that goes unheard in this country. Mahinda Wijesinghe is our guide and an internationally respected one too - he submitted the first third-umpire proposal to the ICC back in 1984.

This is a mixed book of his own essays and statistics. You will surely learn a great deal - from how the locals routinely beat European settlers in early 20th-century matches to the first hero of Sri Lankan cricket - "Derrick" de Saram, who won an Oxford Blue at cricket in the 1930s but refused to tour with MCC in order to play for his own country.

The fun is in the learning, not the reading - Wijesinghe prefers his prose dry. He also writes on umpiring, dissent, and his dislike of Bishan Bedi - odd in a history of Sri Lankan cricket. It turns the whole book into a bit of a vanity project and leaves one hoping that a more skilled and objective writer will one day tackle the subject of cricket's greatest underdog story.

Sri Lanka Cricket at the High Table: the amazing feats in her first 25 years
by Mahinda Wijesinghe
self-published