Sri Lanka Cricket’s interim committee, tasked with “transforming cricket”, has a working draft of a new constitution. They hope that it will become law within weeks.
Speaking to the press yesterday, the interim committee’s chairman, Eran Wickramaratne, said the draft will be sent to the legal draftsman and attorney-general soon, after which it will reach parliament.
The committee drafting the constitution has generated controversy. When the ministry stepped in to appoint a nine-member interim committee in April, there were concerns about Sri Lanka’s standing at the ICC. The ICC maintains a “no political interference” policy.
As one of the ICC’s 12 full members, Sri Lanka Cricket has voting rights and access to substantial funds. In 2024, ICC funds to Sri Lanka Cricket were 10 billion rupees — over half its total income.
This week, Daily Mirror wrote that Jay Shah, the ICC’s Chairman, threatened to blacklist Sri Lanka Cricket if they failed to hold elections for a new, democratic committee by July 31st. According to the report, this had been conveyed to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake in his meeting with Shah on June 19th.
The President’s office and a number of interim committee members present at the meeting denied that such an ultimatum was issued.
A new constitution
The interim committee maintains their meetings with Shah were cordial and constructive. According to them, Shah was “impressed” with how quickly the interim committee had acted to try and return Sri Lanka Cricket to normalcy.
“We are here primarily to draft the constitution. We’ll do our job, and out we go,” said Dinal Philips, a committee member.
Two months after its appointment, the committee has a draft ready after consulting with stakeholders and studying constitutions in other cricketing nations like England, Australia, and South Africa, as well as previous drafts of Sri Lanka’s own cricketing constitutions.
They also hired David Becker, the ICC’s former legal head, as a consultant, and say the new constitution will be “in line with the ICC’s regulations”. In general, the ICC requires non-political interference and autonomous management in all matters, including the selection of the cricket team. If an ICC member doesn’t adhere to its regulations, they risk getting suspended, losing access to higher amounts of funds, and test status.
“Now we have to get it into the parliamentary process,” said Wickramaratne. Both Wickramaratne and Aruna Bandara, the sports ministry secretary, said that parliament will vote on the new constitution.
While Wickramaratne hopes the bill can be tabled by July, he admits that the timeline isn’t solely up to the committee.
Upcoming reforms
Currently the executive committee is elected by 60 cricket clubs, many of which are almost defunct and no longer play in the higher leagues. Dimbula, for instance, is exclusively managed by planters and now only plays cricket in the lower divisions. Yet they still have two votes in electing the SLC executive committee.
A former executive committee member with over two decades of experience explained the problem: “The SSC has 7,000 members, Mutwal has 100. For a long time, they both had the same voting power. Back in the day Mutwal used to play well.”
