Galle makes slow recovery
Everyone knows what happened here when the tsunami struck on Boxing Day 2004.
remain along both sides of the bustling road that clings to the coast between Colombo and Galle – shells of houses with walls missing and their roofs ripped off.
The – but the focus for the cricketing world was Galle.
We have all played or watched cricket on this ground with, at the sea end, the apparently indestructible which saved many lives that day when boys from Harrow School were playing on the ground.
The poignant pictures of red buses being swept away hit hard – the busy bus station is just outside the main gate - and holiday-makers’ videos of the wave hitting land were shot from hotels we had stayed in.
When I first heard the news, I feared for Jayananda Warnaweera, an old adversary of mine who played 10 Tests for Sri Lanka, before becoming the groundsman at Galle.
He survived and popped up on television a couple of days after the disaster, describing how he and the young players had rushed up to the top floor of the pavilion when the first, smaller wave arrived. The big one that followed was 15 feet high. It destroyed the ground and killed thousands of people in the town behind.
England’s cricketers made the journey south yesterday, and . It’s a building site, but for Paul Collingwood, who made his Test debut here the year before the tsunami struck, this will be a special occasion, and he is determined that the game will be played.
Meanwhile, the sound of frantic building works rings out day and night. The ground won’t be ready, at the moment there isn’t even a scoreboard and I have no idea where people are going to sit, but the game will go ahead - it has to, for this is a week for the cricket world to reflect on the bigger picture.
