Colombo: Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake Monday laid the foundation stone for the construction of the first international cricket stadium in the former war-torn region of Jaffna.
Speaking at the ceremony, Dissanayake said Sri Lanka, which was always in the news for wrong reasons such as the civil war, the economic crisis and corruption, found cricket as the only good news provider.
“I would dearly love to see the Sri Lanka team represented by all communities Sinhala Tamil, and Muslim”, he said in his address.
“The Jaffna international cricket stadium will become the country’s seventh international cricket venue and the fifth stadium equipped with floodlights,” the Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) said in a press release.
The ground will be built across 48 acres featuring 10 centre wickets with boundary distance up to 80 metres, exceeding international standards, the SLC added.
“The venue will have a spectator capacity of 40,000, positioning it as a premier cricket destination in the region,” it said.
Jaffna, the cultural capital of the Tamil minority, was under a debilitating civil war from the mid-1980s.
In May 2009, the Sri Lankan Army declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which for three decades had run a parallel administration in the northern and eastern part of the country in their quest to set up a separate Tamil homeland.