#EELAM DANCE SERIES#

ItвЂ™s how former Sri Lanka left-arm seamer Nuwan Zoysa remembers the most memorable moment of his career, when he nailed the long-maned MS Dhoni for a first-ball duck in 2005. Like the Beatles were to the 70s, Sri Lanka were to the 90s and aughts in cricket. But they evoke neither magic nor mystery, neither awe nor dread, as they once did in what seems a distant, faraway era. There are familiar names, like Suranga Lakmal and Dimuth Karunaratne, Dinesh Chandimal and Angelo Mathews.

The build-up would be all about the century thatвЂ™s winking on Virat Kohli, the century thatвЂ™s eluding him, the first stride into a middle-order revamp and the first test of Rohit Sharma as Test captain.Д¬HAMPIONS #TeamIndia рџЋ‰ #INDvSL /Zkmho1SJVG

The Test series, like the T20s, doesnвЂ™t forecast close-fought games. Just when one thought they had taken a forward step, they would take two back the next moment.

Flashes of flickering talent faded in the dazzling light of failure.

#EELAM DANCE SERIES#

The T20 series against India captured the 80s theme. Sri Lankan players congratulates IndiaвЂ™s Ravindra Jadeja after India won the second Twenty20 international cricket match in Dharmsala, India, Saturday, Feb. The team has a 1980s feel to it, creaky, known more for mindless collapses, shoddy bowling, the knack to be explosive and implosive at the same time, players shuffling in and out of the team like ships at the Colombo Port in the years of tea export, or refugee boats out of Point Pedro in Jaffna at the peak of the war. The magic has waned the mystery has ebbed. For the devout, they bring tears and rage for the adversaries, an emptiness that they cannot loath them anymore. Now, though, their cricket is bereft of joy. In 2007, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) declared a ceasefire with the government of Sri Lanka for the duration of the World Cup. When a match was on, even the civil war was given the month off. The civil unrest, then the war, the Tsunami, plummeting economy, and floods, Sri Lankans were wading through turbulence, rather turbulence was wading through the island. Like India and Pakistan, cricket offered Lankans a refuge of warmth and comfort away from trouble and turmoil. Who else would be bargaining with a carpet-seller on the streets of Lahore a day before the 1996 World Cup final, the most important day of their sporting lives? Where else would a cricketer (Rangana Herath) walk into the bank he works a day after picking his 400th Test wicket? Of which countryвЂ™s fiction writer could even imagine a bowler of such unique skills that he could bowl any kind of delivery with either left or right hand as Pradeep Mathew, the protagonist of Shehan KarunatilakaвЂ™s novel The Chinaman? Who could smile so brightly and pick as many wickets as Muttiah Muralitharan? Or walk into the ear-splitting cauldron that was Eden Gardens in 1996 and compose the most composed 66 one could behold as did Aravinda de Silva? Where else is mystery a reality? The cricketers were informal and unpretentious. If the tear-shaped island was too close to not spot on a map, one would have imagined it as a realm of fairies and mermaids, of moonbeams and silvery mountains. The island is barely a good stoneвЂ™s throw from the AdamвЂ™s Bridge at the southern tip of India, but seemed as though it existed somewhere far away, an ethereal world of mystery spinners and insouciant batsmen, of rubbery fields-men and slithery seamers, who wrapped their necks and arms with magic threads, whose long and melodious surnames exhausted most alphabets in English, who had the longest and the most tuneful national anthem on the cricketing stage.

Eelam dance