Having become two of Sri Lanka’s leading cricketers of all time, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene now hope to use their culinary tastes to become some of the country’s best restaurateurs.

The pair have teamed up with restaurateur Dharshan Munidasa to open the “Ministry of Crab” at the Old Dutch Hospital in Colombo, the Island reported. The restaurant will serve the best of Sri Lanka’s sea food and a signature dish of export-quality crabs, not usually available in Sri Lanka.

Former captain Sangakkara has been interested in food for a long time and during a spell in England with Warwickshire, cookery shows became his favourite TV programmes.

Another former Sri Lanka captain had dabbled in the culinary world. Aravinda de Silva entered the restaurant business with an establishment specialising in Sri Lankan cuisine but has since disposed of his interest.

Sri Lanka are known to produce bowlers with the most unique actions, but few know about the ones that got away. Delivering the Cowdrey Lecture at Lord's on Monday, Kumar Sangakkara mentioned two such characters to illustrate how the team management thinks out of the box in their search for talent. "A district coach had discovered a volleyball player who ran to the crease slowly but then delivered the ball while in mid-air with a smash-like leap", Sangakkara said. "His leap would land him quite a way down the pitch in the follow-through". Unfortunately, despite an interest shown by the national selectors, the high-flying bowler didn't quite make it beyond his first screening. The reason? Bowling for half an hour in the nets – his longest spell ever – had strained his back.

And then there was the story of the monk. "A letter postmarked from a remote village in Sri Lanka had the writer claiming to be the fastest undiscovered bowler in Sri Lanka. A district coach investigating this claim found the writer to be a teenage Buddhist priest who insisted upon giving a demonstration of bowling while still dressed in his saffron-coloured robes." As Sangakkara put it, cricket in Sri Lanka tempts even the most chaste and holy.

High-profile cricket is all set to make its debut in Jaffna after years of a bitter and bloody civil war. The Northern Province, of which Jaffna is the capital, is among the seven teams that will be part of the Sri Lankan Premier League (SLPL) Twenty20 tournament beginning on July 19. “The decision to include Northern Province as one of the teams was taken to promote the game in the region, where the talent pool has been largely untapped because of years of fighting,” Sri Lanka Cricket secretary Nishantha Ranatunga told the Indian Express. “Since the end of the war, we have tried to promote the game in the Northern and North-Eastern Province.”

There have been ongoing efforts over the past year to develop cricket in the region with plans to construct two turf wickets at selected Jaffna schools. “Over 20 qualified coaches have been working to promote the game through the Jaffna Schools Cricket Association and the Jaffna District Cricket Association. Former fast bowler Ravindra Pushpakumara has been in charge of coaching in the Northern Province over the past year and the talent is very promising,” Ranatunga said. Sri Lanka’s cricketers have been doing their bit in Jaffna with former batsman Aravinda de Silva having been involved in school cricket training programmes, while the likes of Muttiah Muralitharan, Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara were involved in relief efforts when the tsunami struck the region in 2005.

The honours keep pouring in for Muttiah Muralitharan, who recently retired as the highest wicket-taker in Tests with 800 scalps. The latest one is a proposal to name a cricket stadium, currently under construction in Sri Lanka, after him.

A 22,000-capacity stadium, which is being constructed in Pallekele in Murali’s home district of Kandy, is due to stage three World Cup matches in 2011. And according to the Daily Mirror a proposal has been mooted to name the stadium the Muttiah Muralitharan International Cricket Stadium. The proposal has the backing of the provincial governor, Tikiri Kobbekaduwa, and will be put to Sri Lanka Cricket shortly

© AFP

They may have formed a mighty coalition on the cricket field, architects of their country’s greatest cricket moments. But former Sri Lankan captains Sanath Jayasuriya and Arjuna Ranatunga are now cast against each other in the political arena. Jayasuriya has announced his intentions to enter politics and is expected to contest the upcoming parliamentary elections as a candidate of the ruling United People Freedom Alliance (UPFA) while Ranatunga, formerly with the UPFA, has backed the defeated opposition presidential candidate Sarath Fonseka. And for good measure the pupil has thumbed his nose at the master in another way: “I will not give up cricket though I am coming into politics,” Jayasuriya recently said, ending the debate on Ranatunga’s comment that active cricket players should not join politics.

	Ian Botham on his trip to Sri Lanka in 2005 © Getty Images

Sir Ian Botham is set to take a break from his commentary duties in South Africa to return to Sri Lanka with the Laureus Sport for Good foundation, where he will mark the fifth anniversary of the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004.

In early 2005, Botham was one of the first high-profile cricketers to travel to the worst-affected areas on the south of the island to assess the damage and raise awareness. “Nothing prepared me for what I saw there,” he writes in his Laureus blog. “What made it even more horrifying was that I had been to these places before. In 2003 when I was covering cricket for Sky TV, I stayed at a house just along the beach from Galle – it wasn’t there anymore!

“The fishermen, the market stalls along the road, the other houses on the coast, they had all gone. The cricket ground looked like the surface of the moon. I can still recall the clock on the old Test ground in Galle frozen at ‘9.25am’ on December 26.”

Botham’s visit will be a two-day affair on December 1 and 2, during which time he will visit some of the communities and projects in and around Galle that have been rebuilding their lives since that fateful day. For example, the Foundation of Goodness in Seenigama has built a cricket ground that now allows boys and girls, aged from six upwards, to take part in inter-village sports leagues with matches and training sessions.

“I hope to find that the people of Sri Lanka are rebuilding their lives and that sport is helping people, particularly the younger ones, to finally put this devastating event behind them – and have fun again. They certainly deserve it.”

Read more about Botham’s trip and follow his progress at blog.laureus.com

Cricket sponsorship took a step forward with the unveiling of the world’s first digital trophy in Colombo on Monday. Actually, make that a half-step; while the visuals were fine, including the much-hyped LCD screen in the middle of the trophy, the audio wasn’t. First, the soundtrack to the PR film failed to work and then the suits got into action with a detailed briefing more suitable to an ad client presentation than an audience including top international cricketers. We were promised “an enriching consumer experience, through technology and innovative design”. No wonder the likes of Vettori and Sangakkara looked bored (Dhoni, the third captain in this tournament, wasn’t even there, adding to the incongruency of the occasion). Not a good day, then, for the uneasy, if increasingly symbiotic, relationship between cricket and technology - but the on-field action, beginning Tuesday, promises much more.