News The Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo will stage its first men’s T20 international since 2010 – and its first match under lights – when Pakistan meet the Netherlands in Saturday’s T20 World Cup opener.
For more than 120 years SSC has been the understated heart of Sri Lankan cricket. Muthiah Muralidaran’s 166 Test wickets here still form a record for a single ground, Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara famously piled up 624, and Chaminda Vaas once dismantled Zimbabwe with 8 for 19. The place oozes history; what it has lacked, until now, is electricity after dusk.
While other venues raced into the floodlit, six-hit era, SSC stuck with whites and long shadows. Its last men’s white-ball game was an ODI in 2020, its last men’s T20I a sweltering afternoon associate fixture back in 2010. A women’s T20I in 2023 briefly broke the drought, but only during daylight.
That changes this weekend. Six new LED towers – an LKR 1.8 billion installation – will flick on in time for Pakistan v Netherlands. Oman v Zimbabwe follows on 9 February, then Pakistan v USA a day later. Capacity is 12,000, deliberately “boutique”, though plans are already afoot for a 6,000-seat three-tier stand on the western hill.
“My God, for the last two decades,” said SSC cricket-committee chairman Samantha Dodanwela, exhaling as though he had carried the cables himself. The club first talked about lights in 2009; legal wrangles, wary members and a shortage of commercial partners kept the project on ice. Only when Sri Lanka Cricket guaranteed support and a specialist legal team wrote watertight agreements did the board finally sign off.
“This venue is in the heart of the city,” Dodanwela added. “You will see members patronising the club in the evenings; the crowd will always be there.” A mid-week beer after work, he believes, is as important to the club’s future as five-day cricket.
Dodanwela joined SSC in 1990 and has chaired the cricket committee since 2011, bar a short stint when Jayawardene stepped in from 2020-22. Tradition matters to him – the pavilion, the old trees, the whispers of past greats – yet he recognises where the game is heading.
“The SSC pitch is the best in Sri Lanka. If you are a good bowler, there is life early on. But if you survive? There are loads of runs. And in T20, what we need is runs.”
Ground staff say the square should still behave much as it always has: seam for half an hour, then flatten into a stroke-maker’s dream. The trick under lights will be dew; evening moisture can turn even the best surfaces into damp pads, and spinners tend to struggle to grip the ball. Sri Lanka Cricket’s curator has already trialled anti-dew sprays and extra rollers.
Players seem intrigued. One national-squad batter, not officially authorised to speak, called SSC’s twilight nets “surprisingly quick, with good carry”. An assistant coach noted the “beautiful sight-screen sight-lines” – small details that matter once the TV cameras roll.
Financially, the figures add up. Two group games featuring Pakistan, one of the World Cup’s biggest draws, were worth pursuing, even with temporary seating and extra security costs. A mid-afternoon start means local fans can still catch the bus home, while viewership in Europe slots neatly into breakfast.
Heritage aficionados will worry the club is selling a piece of its soul. Dodanwela insists autonomy is protected: membership rules still apply, blazers remain compulsory upstairs, and the Test schedule is untouched. The lights, he argues, are simply “a guarantee of relevance” for the next generation.
If the experiment works – if Colombo’s rush-hour traffic doesn’t spook supporters, if the pitch behaves and the bulbs stay bright – SSC expects more evening fixtures. Provincial T20, women’s double-headers, even the occasional pop concert are on the table. Not everything must be massive, Dodanwela stresses; a “Thursday night 4,000-strong crowd is fine” if it pays for junior coaching.
Long-term, the cricketing calendar will decide. For now SSC has flicked the switch. When Pakistan’s new-ball pair steam in on Saturday and the ball flashes under fresh LED glare, one of the game’s grand old theatres will finally be playing at night – still dignified, just a little brighter.
