Lahiru creates history with Youth Olympic silver
Sri Lanka fall for the green top trap
The infrastructure crisis at state universities
Revatha, Anuradhapura Central clash in U19 Division Two semi-final
Pakistan field four debutants for first Test; Sri Lanka opt to bowl
A five-wicket haul by Mahiru Kodituwakku and a fighting unbeaten knock of 92 runs by Manuth Dasanayake were the highlights as Royal College Colombo beat arch-rivals S. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia, to win the Under-17 Division I cricket title at P. Sara Stadium on Friday.
Chasing 206 runs for victory, S. Thomas’ lost wickets at regular intervals as Mahiru Kodituwakku led the bowling attack with a five-wicket haul to dismiss them for 133 runs.
Kodituwakku demoralized the Thomian batting lineup by taking early wickets. They lost their first four wickets for 31 runs inside seven overs, before being bowled out in the 33rd over.
Kodituwakku completed impressive figures of 7.5-0-32-5.
The victory looked a distant possibility halfway through Royal’s first innings. Tharul Jayasuriya struck early blows, removing Savain Gamage and Nithesh Jayasinghe cheaply, before Shenuk Fernando accounted for Mudith Gunasekara and skipper Dushen Udawela to leave Royal struggling at 73 for four wickets. However, after being five wickets down at 86 at one stage, Royal recovered to post a competitive total, thanks to an unbeaten 92 from Manuth Dasanayake.
Manuth held the batting lineup together with his dogged knock, which came off 87 balls. He cracked eight fours and five sixes in an entertaining performance.
(Mudith Gunasekara 38, Manuth Dasanayake 92n.o.; Shenuk Fernando 2/20, Tharul Jayasuriya 2/61)
S. Thomas’ 133 all out in 36.5 overs
(Reshon Solomans 38, Tharul Jayasuriya 29; Mahiru Kodituwakku 5/32, Gagan Gamage 2/42) (RF)
Royal edge out Thomians to win Under 17 Division I cricket title
Sri Lanka thwart Fatima Sana challenge to secure Asia Cup final spot
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Sri Lanka’s rising middle-distance runner Lahiru Achintha produced another outstanding international performance to win the silver medal in the men’s 1500 metres at the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games in Senegal on Monday.
Achintha clocked 3:59.08 in the closely contested final, finishing just 0.35 seconds behind Ethiopia’s Wabi Seblega, who won the gold medal in 3:58.73. Spain’s Alex Sangil took the bronze in 3:59.70.
After setting the pace of the race leading the first two laps, the former St. Aloysius’ College, Ratnapura runner had to fight hard in the last lap to settle for silver.
Achintha’s performance is the best by a Sri Lankan at these games and he is only the second Sri Lankan to win a medal at the Youth Olympics. The country’s previous medal came when Parami Wasanthi Maristell won bronze in the women’s 2000m steeplechase at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games.
Continue Reading Sports Sri Lanka fall for the green top trap Published
Every time Sri Lanka see a green top, they seem to imagine Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall are sharing the new ball for them, with Joel Garner at first change and Colin Croft waiting to finish the job. Four seamers go on the team sheet, the opposition are invited to bat and before long, Caribbean dreams give way to Sri Lankan damage control.
That was the script at Pallekele against Pakistan in 2015, when the think tank opted for an all-seam attack. The man deemed surplus to requirements? Rangana Herath of all people.
Rawalpindi on Monday brought a familiar sequel. This time, poor Prabath Jayasuriya was left carrying the drinks.
Pakistan’s fifty arrived in 52 balls as Sri Lanka’s quicks sprayed the new ball around. In his maiden Test as captain, Kusal Mendis was soon discovering the value of a bowler who could land six deliveries in roughly the same postcode. Jayasuriya would have been useful.
At one stage, Pakistan were rattling along at five an over. There was width on offer and no shortage of volunteers to put it away. A green pitch might encourage fast bowling, but it does not bowl line and length for you.
An all seam attack also brings another familiar headache: getting through the overs. Slow over rates can cost more than a slice of the match fee, with World Test Championship points also at stake. Sri Lanka may be out of the running for a place in the final, but a respectable finish is still worth pursuing.
Pakistan’s cricket, much like Sri Lanka’s, has been lurching from one crisis to another, with even the Supreme Court drawn into questions over how the game should be run.
Four Pakistan players made their Test debuts on Monday, taking the tally for the year to 12. The last time they introduced that many in a calendar year was 1952, when they were granted Test status. There was an obvious explanation then. Now, the revolving door tells its own story about the turmoil within the system.
This was an opportunity for Sri Lanka to cash in. Instead, they got their sums wrong.
To their credit, the quicks bent their backs and clawed back some ground as the day wore on. Effort, however, was never the principal concern. Discipline was. Asitha Fernando, Lahiru Kumara and Dilshan Madushanka all conceded more than four runs an over, allowing Pakistan to keep the scoreboard moving without having to manufacture much.
Only 67.2 overs were possible before bad light brought an early close. Four Pakistan batters reached half-centuries, although three failed to turn promising starts into something more substantial.
Saud Shakeel remained unbeaten on 57. He has been a thorn in Sri Lanka’s flesh before and remains Pakistan’s biggest hope of turning a useful start into a commanding total.
It was only the opening day, and Test cricket usually leaves the door ajar for a comeback. Sri Lanka must now find a way through it and remember that picking four fast bowlers does not make you the West Indies of the 1980s.
It is difficult to imagine a university without its physical infrastructure. The classrooms, laboratories, libraries, auditoriums, board rooms, study halls, halls of residence, parking space, and sanitary facilities are all essential parts of the built infrastructure of a university. For education to happen in a meaningful, inclusive and democratic manner, these spaces are essential, should be maintained properly and upgraded and expanded, based on needs. However, the state university system in Sri Lanka today reveals a disappointing situation when it comes to physical infrastructure.
Take for example the Faculty of Arts, University of Jaffna, where I teach. The classrooms are either inadequate or under-sized to conduct all the courses included in the academic programmes offered by the Faculty. When student numbers increase, we conduct classes in auditoriums which are meant for public meetings and cultural programmes. Due to the shortage of classrooms, classes take place in our offices and sometimes via Zoom, even under normal circumstances. The hostel facilities available for our undergraduates are woefully inadequate. As a result, the students are asked to find private boarding places when they move to their second and third years. The sanitary facilities require better maintenance. Talking to colleagues at other universities in the country, I realise these issues are not specific to the University of Jaffna or its Faculty of Arts. Though new buildings and hostels have come up at some universities and funding for disability inclusion has increased under the current government, the general picture looks far from satisfactory. We saw university teachers and students demand fervently for increased and better infrastructure at the protests and rallies they conducted recently.
The primary reason for the infrastructure crisis, faced by our universities today, is lack of state funding for education. Although many, including the current Minister of Education, once demanded that 6% of the GDP be allocated to education, the materialisation of this demand remains a distant dream, even under a supposedly left-leaning government. The crux of the problem is the neoliberal logic that informs Sri Lanka’s economic decisions. The IMF programmes that Sri Lanka relied on for economic revival have made the political establishment and authorities who make decisions concerning education believe that increased funding on social goods like education is undesirable and privatisation the way forward. The austerity push that we see today, under the current IMF-driven Extended Fund Facility arrangement, leaves no room for efforts to rejuvenate our education system, including its physical infrastructure. As a result, the buildings at our universities are allowed to deteriorate and students are pushed out of hostels and forced to pay exorbitant rents.
The infrastructure crisis has been compounded by the rapid increase in admission of students to the state universities in the past few decades. While expansion of free education is an important and democratising move, it cannot be done without a simultaneous increase in physical and human resources. The country’s free education system cannot be democratised through populist measures that do not pay sufficient attention to the availability of resources. The Ministry of Education and the University Grants Commission should first engage in proper deliberations and planning, along with university administrations, about increasing student intake and expansion of infrastructure. These consultative processes cannot be done for namesake but should be genuinely participatory and democratic. What we see today is that University administrators are either forced to comply with decisions made at the top with regard to admissions or they choose not to express their views openly at meetings since their opinions may displease authorities in the UGC or the Ministry. The burden of accommodating the increasing number of students fall on the universities and the academics. This results in overpopulated classrooms and an unhealthy educational environment.
Another reason for the infrastructure crisis that we face today is thoughtless academic and curriculum planning on the part of universities and faculties. To create a name for themselves or score points for their promotion, university academics sometimes rush to create new academic programmes. The World Bank and other donor agencies push universities to offer too many superficial courses in soft skills without taking into consideration the physical infrastructure and human resources available at the institution. Our universities readily embrace these ill-conceived proposals without assessing their usefulness to the students and the wider community and whether they have the necessary resources to implement them. Our curriculum committees, Faculty Boards and Senates fail to understand that the curriculum we teach cannot exist in isolation of the material conditions of the university and the availability of finances and resources. As a way forward, we must bring in the question of infrastructure as a central discussion point in planning, prioritising and revising our academic programmes and courses.
As observed by many writers in the previous editions of Kuppi Talk, universities are hierarchised spaces. There are hierarchies of disciplines and hierarchies of social relations that appear along lines of gender, ethnicity and (dis)ability. In planning and refurbishing physical infrastructure, a common tendency is observed across our system: prioritising science and technology subjects over the humanities and social sciences. Whether it is the government or the UGC or administrators of our universities, everyone seems to think that when it comes to financial allocations for infrastructure facilities, laboratories and technical equipment should top the list. The fact that Faculties of Humanities and Social Sciences accommodate the largest numbers of students does not appear as a factor worthy of consideration in their deliberations. That these faculties, too, need adequate space for teaching and learning, academic conversations and cultural performances which are integral to their curriculum does not occur to decision-makers.
Similarly, when decisions concerning physical infrastructure development are made, the needs of female students and female academics, especially sanitary facilities that are essential for them, are not taken into consideration seriously. Decision-making is oblivious to gender as a category that plays a key role in shaping our experience of the university infrastructure. The physical spaces that we use for teaching and learning should be inclusive towards students with disabilities as well. There should be adequate and appropriate learning equipment that can support the education of such students. In the universities in the North-East, students come in large numbers from war-affected communities. A significant number of students with war-related disabilities are accommodated at these universities. The current allocations to support such students should be increased.
Our universities sometimes prioritise the outward appearance of the university over the actual educational and extra-curricular needs of the students in planning physical infrastructure. Recently, when a state university celebrated a key anniversary, the entrance to the university was refurbished and decorated in a grand manner. When this happened, one student posted a critical question on social media about the importance given to the front entrance and the simultaneous negligence that classrooms had suffered in the past few years. There are students and teachers who have, time and again, registered their discontent over the infrastructure situation at their universities. However, their voices have had little impact on actual decision making.
The state, the Ministry of Education, the University Grants Commission and the administrations of our universities and we, academics, must take responsibility for the crisis our universities are facing today. Our reliance on neoliberal (non) solutions, negligence and shortsightedness have all contributed to this situation. Governments and university administrations change but the grip of neoliberalism and misgovernance never seem to leave us. To change this situation, we have to first prioritise education as an important social good and a democratic and democratising process that needs to be supported by the state. This support should include increased spending on the physical infrastructure of our educational institutions. Decisions concerning infrastructure planning, development and refurbishment should happen in a democratic manner through deliberative processes where the voices of the students and teachers are heard with seriousness and sincerity. We need to see the changes we propose to infrastructure as a democratising move. Such changes should aim to dismantle the hierarchies that reproduce universities as unequal spaces, and create the university as a space of inclusion.
(Mahendran Thiruvarangan is a Senior Lecturer attached to the Department of Linguistics & English at the University of Jaffna)
Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.
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