ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2019

502 Sri Lanka in 2018/19 rivals saw them comfortably home. The Plate competition for the bottom six Tier A teams was won by Burgher RC, with Sri Lanka Ports Authority in last place and likely to be replaced for 2019/20 by Tier B champions Lankan CC.  Two outstanding individual performances in Tier A will be prominent in the record-books in years to come. The more unexpected was the achievement of AK (Angelo) Perera in becoming only the second player ever to score two double-centuries in the same first-class match. In the 80 years since Arthur Fagg first performed the feat for Kent in 1938, no one had come at all close to matching it. But in the Super Eight match for Nondescripts against SSC, Perera followed his first-innings 201 with a second innings of 231; and just as with Fagg, his second-innings runs were no ‘gimme’ by the opposition, for when he came in to bat at number five his side led by only eight runs with seven wickets remaining, and every run was important.  Of equal merit, if slightly less rarity-value, were the performances of two slow left-arm bowlers in the match between Colombo CC and Saracens in January. First, Saracens’ Chamikara Edirisinghe took the first nine wickets to fall in Colombo’s first innings, being denied all ten when occasional bowler Ashen Bandara took the last wicket. Then in Saracens’ second innings, Malinda Pushpakumara went one better to record the first first-class all-ten anywhere in the world since 2009/10. His 10-37 was the best innings return ever recorded in Sri Lanka, and in the match as a whole he clocked up the country’s second-best match figures of 16-110.  The Test side’s lack of success led some to express concerns that the Sri Lanka team’s progress was being hampered by too-frequent changes of coaches and captains, and by the lack of sustained fitness among their quicker bowlers. Others saw the problems as more fundamental, resulting from the poor preparation for Test cricket afforded by the spin-dominated domestic game. In an effort to remedy this, for 2018/19 groundsmen were asked to keep more grass on their pitches; but the hope that this would assist the quicker bowlers proved vain, and it was the batsmen who largely benefited. Over the season as a whole, five batsmen reached a thousand first-class runs, with Pathum Nissanka (Nondescripts CC and Sri Lanka A) leading the way with 1346 at 89.73. And still the spinners dominated the wicket-takers, with Malinda Pushpakumara (Colombo CC and the national side) heading the lists – for the third season in a row - with 72 at 22.27. Four other bowlers, all spinners, took more than fifty wickets; indeed, all of the season’s top six wicket-takers were spinners, five of them slow left-armers. (KSW) Premier League Tournament (Tier A) 2018/19: Final tables Group A P W WI L DWF DLF ND BatBP BowBP Pts CF* 12 14 0 8 0 1 Nondescripts 6 2 0 0 3 1 0 16.985 13.95 78.935 38.99 2 Chilaw Marians 6 1 1 0 2 2 0 14.225 13.35 69.575 20.12 3 Tamil Union 6 0 0 0 5 1 0 11.77 13.5 65.27 28.565 4 Sri Lanka Army 6 1 0 0 2 3 0 12.755 9.9 50.655 9.27 5 Ragama 6 0 0 0 2 4 0 10.94 13.5 40.44 15.86 6 Sri Lanka Ports Authority 6 0 0 2 1 3 0 13.065 11.1 32.165 15.765 7 Moors 6 0 0 3 1 2 0 12.29 11.25 31.54 16.08 Group B P W WI L DWF DLF ND BatBP BowBP Pts CF* 12 14 0 8 0 1 Colombo 6 1 2 1 2 0 0 14.15 15.75 85.9 41.23 2 Sinhalese 6 2 1 0 2 1 0 12.23 16.2 82.43 33.895 3 Saracens 6 1 0 1 2 1 1 11.825 11.85 51.675 19.425 4 Colts 6 0 0 1 3 2 0 13.98 10.95 48.93 20.015 5 Badureliya 6 0 0 0 2 4 0 12.305 9.75 38.055 14.475 6 Burgher 6 0 0 2 1 2 1 12.42 12.3 32.72 17.135 7 Negombo 6 0 0 2 1 3 0 11.83 10.8 30.63 16.09