ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2018

The only first-class cricket in Sri Lanka in the 2017/18 season was purely domestic, consisting of the usual Premier League tournament followed by a revived Provincial tournament. The former took the same pattern as in the previous season, with the top teams (Tier A) playing off in two groups before the most successful contested the title via a Super Eight tournament, while the less successful contested a similar Plate competition. Tier B was again played as a single all-play-all league, in which Negombo – excluded from the previous year’s competition after a dispute as described in these pages a year ago – made a belated entry to the first-class scene. Meanwhile, the separate dispute that had clouded the end of the previous season, arising from the Panadura v Kalutara PCC match in January 2017 (see page 537 of last year’s Annual ), seemed to have been forgotten, with Panadura evidently accepting that they should remain in Tier B, while the suspensions initially applied to the 22 players in the disputed match seem to have been laid aside: 13 of them reappeared in 2017/18, including ten from the Panadura XI – though all those ten moved to a different club for 2017/18. One suspects that somewhere in Colombo there is a carpet under which this whole affair has now been swept. On the field, the Premier League was a triumph for Chilaw Marians, who secured the title for the second time since their promotion to first-class level in 2001. They won nine of their ten matches outright, and tied the other (one of three ties in the domestic season; until 2016/17 there had been none in 90 years of first-class cricket on the island, but now there have been four). They made sure of the title in their final Super Eight match with a convincing 264-run win over SSC, who had topped the other group in the initial phase of the competition. In Tier B, Negombo justified their elevation by heading the table narrowly ahead of Lankan CC. Only one of the six matches in the Provincial tournament ended in a definite result, but it was Galle District who secured the title, thanks to first-innings leads in all their three, drawn, games. Chilaw Marians provided the leading runscorer and wicket-taker of the Premier League competition: respectively Sachithra Serasinghe (901 runs at 53.00) and Malinda Pushpakumara (70 wickets at 16.47). The same two players also led the aggregates in all matches, with Serasinghe using his matches for Dambulla in the Provincial tournament to increase his overall tally to 1108 runs at 48.17 (no other batsman even reached 900 runs), and Pushpakumara, playing for Galle District at provincial level, increasing his tally to 73 wickets at 17.87, and so taking the palm as the leading wicket-taker for the second season in succession. (KSW) Sri Lanka Premier League Tier A 2017/18: Final tables Group A P W WInns T L DWF DLF BatBP BowBP Pts CF* 12 14 6 0 8 4 1 Sinhalese 6 1 0 0 0 4 1 12.305 14.85 71.155 33.560 2 Ragama 6 0 0 0 0 5 1 14.925 12.00 66.925 27.050 3 Colts 6 1 1 0 1 2 1 12.76 12.00 66.760 32.430 4 Saracens 6 0 0 0 2 3 1 13.73 11.40 49.130 12.930 5 Colombo 6 0 1 0 0 1 4 14.56 10.20 46.760 16.040 6 Moors 6 0 0 0 0 1 5 11.61 13.80 33.410 16.855 7 Bloomfield 6 0 0 0 1 1 4 11.765 13.05 32.815 17.695 Group B P W WInns T L DWF DLF BatBP BowBP Pts CF* 12 14 6 0 8 4 1 Chilaw Marians 6 3 2 1 0 0 0 13.445 18.00 101.445 46.740 2 Burgher 6 1 0 1 1 3 0 11.520 16.20 69.720 31.985 3 Nondescripts 6 3 0 0 3 0 0 10.825 16.50 63.325 25.445 4 Sri Lanka Ports Authority 6 1 1 0 3 1 0 9.355 15.15 58.505 23.810 5 Tamil Union 6 1 0 0 2 2 1 14.030 12.75 54.780 25.220 6 Sri Lanka Army 6 1 0 0 2 0 3 13.420 10.95 36.370 7.820 7 Badureliya 6 1 0 0 3 0 2 10.375 13.20 35.575 20.935 464 Sri Lanka in 2017/18