Crishan Kalugamage was 16 years old when he joined his two older brothers on the journey from Sri Lanka to Italy where his parents had emigrated a year earlier in search of a brighter economic future. His father found work in a factory treating yacht parts with weather-proof paint.
Young Crishan and his siblings missed the palm trees and white beaches of Marawila in the northwest of the country but Crishan missed cricket more. He took up athletics and became a modest sprinter and long-jumper but didn’t have the required physique, though he says “athletics made me grow stronger”.
Occasionally he would bowl a few overs in impromptu tennis ball matches but nothing approaching organised cricket. But then he found, and joined, Roma Cricket Club and the dormant cricket ball started to roll. Injuries forced him to change from fast bowling to leg-spin, which came surprisingly easily to him.
He made his debut for Italy four years ago in the World Cup subregional European qualifier match against Greece and was player of the match with figures of 3/11 from his four overs. The now 34-year-old was man of the match again last week with 3/18 in his adopted country’s wonderful 10-wicket victory against Nepal.
Kalugamage conducted his press conference in fluent Italian, for the few people present who could speak Italian, but was equally comfortable in English: “You can’t buy this with money,” he said with a tear in his eye. And money has been a constant problem in the pursuit of his cricket dreams.
He currently has a contract job at a pizza restaurant but says that, like so many jobs he has lost in the past, it won’t last long with all the time he spends away from home playing cricket. The club league is only played on Sundays but the business of qualifying for World Cups requires huge time commitments.
Anthony Mosca kissing his younger brother, Justin, on the forehead and hugging him closely having just completed an unbroken opening partnership of 124 to beat Nepal was strong evidence to refute the notion that T20 cricket produces no lasting memories and is instantly forgettable most of the time.
The Mosca brothers may reside and play Grade Cricket in Australia but they are incredibly proud of their Italian heritage. While Jon Jon Smuts may be the outlier in the Italian team having not actually visited the country, there isn’t much doubt that the other South African playing for the country, Gian-Piero Sergio Meade, has Italian connections.
These are the stories we want from cricket World Cups.
Not the sour, toxic spectacle of waste served up by India and Pakistan on Sunday. Sport is so important precisely because it is so unimportant. Sporting contests should provide a vital function in life and society ― the ability to remove us from the real world and provide an escape from the daily toil of making pizzas for a living.
Sportsmen and women refer frequently to the “heat of the battle” and the military allusion doesn’t stop there. But it should never actually be a proxy for war. The Indian government’s instruction to the BCCI to instruct the players not to shake hands or extend any notion of cordiality before, during or after their match against Pakistan is more evidence of the unsuitability and unworthiness of its involvement in cricket.
What is paid sex without respect or affection? Prostitution. What is sport that is played purely for money and national jingoism? Inappropriate. It is an embarrassment to the game, to all other teams in the tournament and to most of the billion watching, including millions of Indians. A middle-aged couple having a blazing argument in a supermarket.
India continued their domination on the field with a 61-run thrashing of Pakistan. They have lost just one of their last 15 matches at global events. India is the best T20 team at the tournament and one of the best yet. That should be sufficient reason to respect what sporting competition stands for.
Ideally the fixture would be postponed indefinitely until the players on both teams are permitted to behave like grown-ups. But then everyone else in the cricket-playing world, including the Italians, would go hungry. What a mess.
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