By the time the fireworks erupted above the R Premadasa Stadium after the Sri Lanka Premier League final late last week, most of the 26,000 fans who had braved the evening's weather had filtered out.
It had been a long night. The pyrotechnics had been planned to coincide with the lifting of the trophy, but it was too wet to hold the presentation outside. This final act of the SLPL fit the tournament perfectly. The audience was small and it was 1am, but the fireworks still went off in the damp, at times spectacularly. Those who saw them enjoyed the show. The disgruntled and the apathetic would have felt they hadn't missed out on much.
Earlier in the evening, Angelo Mathews had played an innings he rated his best T20 knock and Dilshan Munaweera confirmed himself one of Sri Lanka's most exciting prospects. It had been a match that had the makings of a great final, but couldn't quite deliver a satisfactory climax.
Perhaps it was the SLC's carousel of embarrassments in the preceding 15 months as well as the SLPL's stuttering birth, but almost everyone approached the tournament with low expectations. "It was good to see it get off the ground at all," former Sri Lanka cricketer and commentator Russel Arnold says. "With the false start last year and the problems leading up to [the SLPL] this year, it went much better than expected, and the fact that it happened was positive." The bar had been lowered to such an extent that even the mildest success became a resounding victory. In the tournament organisers' own words, the SLPL "over-delivered" on what had been anticipated, primarily because before the tournament it had been difficult to find someone who was not a skeptic.
Each of the SLPL's accomplishments, though, came with significant disappointments, the most conspicuous of which were the poor crowds. Of the 16 evenings on which cricket was played, only five nights were well attended. The cheapest tickets cost less than a loaf of bread, and partway through the tournament, organisers began to let people in for free, but still, apart from three nights in Kandy, the first semi-final (the other was rained out) and the final, the stadiums remained largely vacant.
"When you play in the same ground for a week, it's going to be tough to fill it up," Arnold said. "Also with the World T20 coming, the SLPL was sharing that market. People were probably looking ahead to that and this wasn't in their plans. The small crowds were understandable, but next year they will need to get the logistics right so the crowds can come in."
The fact that not enough buzz had been built around the tournament before it began did not help attendance either. There were plenty of SLPL billboards around Colombo, but beyond knowing of the tournament's existence, most people were unaware of the specifics. "Oh it's like the IPL?" "Who is playing then?" "When is the next match?" Even Colombo tuk-tuk drivers, who can usually cram a 40-minute ride with their opinions on the game, were unable to speak knowledgably about the SLPL until two weeks in, when they had begun to match players with the correct franchises.
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