From cricket to catastrophe

Brendon Kuruppu

On Wednesday Brendon Kuruppu, the manager of the Sri Lankan cricket team, was in Napier, walking in the wind. He was snatching a little time for himself. It was pretty much his single solitary moment since the news on Boxing Day that his country had been hit, and hit badly, by the tsunami.

Walking was time to think. Except that the phone kept ringing. We had a conversation between gusts and he said, yes, of course, he would make time to talk to me. He is ever courteous, even when the last thing he wants to do is be interviewed. If there is a faint sigh on the line, perhaps it's the wind. Or exhaustion.

He has been nights without sleep, and there hasn't been time to think about his own response to the disaster. "My priority was to think about the team."

On Friday morning, the day the team will fly out of New Zealand having decided they couldn't play cricket when at home almost 30,000 people had died, Kuruppu meets us in the lobby of an Auckland hotel.

He looks slightly less hollow-eyed than he did the day before at the airport, trying to get the team on a flight home that day. He could have got some of them out, but not all. The decision was eventually made that they would fly home as a team.

So this morning, decision made, passports all together in a bag from Farmers - he jokes that these were just some unneeded documents - he has time to pull up a chair for a 30-minute interview.

That is not quite true: he has made time because he is a very gentlemanly sort of fellow. At the airport the previous day, where we had agreed to meet on the off-chance that he might have a few spare moments, the New Zealand Cricket media man told me that it just wasn't going to happen that day.

"That's all right," I said, "I've told him that if I'm annoying him to just tell me to bugger off." (I didn't put it quite like that to Kuruppu.)

"He wouldn't do that," he said.

No, of course he wouldn't.

If, throughout the interview, his eyes are constantly sliding away to the next table where those passports are being checked and rechecked, it is not out of boredom or rudeness but because his attention is on getting his team home.

If he plays constantly with his cellphone as though it is a lifeline, that's because it has been: he's had it pretty much permanently attached to his ear since the news broke.

When it did, one of the things Kuruppu said was that the team were professionals and would "get in the mood" to play if they had to. As time went on, it became evident that this wasn't going to be possible. So there was an emotional conflict because what professionals do is take pride in the game going on.

"It is a difficult job, because this is a game. And although we are professionals, we need to put our heart and soul and to give all if we are going to play well. But we haven't talked anything about cricket. We have only been talking about what is happening at home. So with that mentality it is difficult for us to think that we can get back to being professionals and to play."

Yet Kuruppu has had to go on doing his job, and there is no handbook for cricket team managers to tell you what to do in the event of a tsunami at home while you are away on tour.

"No, and I don't think there ever will be," he says, although he could now presumably write one.

If he did, he would write that, for the manager, attempting to keep morale up means putting yours aside in a place to be examined some time later. He is patently uncomfortable when asked: "And how is your morale?" Or about how he's coping with a situation which has plainly caused something akin to shell shock among team members - you saw it on their faces, in their averted eyes as they came into the arrival hall at the airport.

If you ask him about his part in the decision to go home, he says, it was "to convey the feelings of the team to the Sri Lankan board". He won't talk about whether his own feelings were taken into consideration: "What we did was convey the team's feelings."

This is not a comfortable line of questioning. "Not really. I need to keep myself going and I need to basically keep my emotions to myself ... because if I start to show my emotions that is going to be very bad for the team."

But, "we are a Third World country, our culture is different to the Western culture and what we feel is that it is not morally right to play cricket at this moment when people are suffering so much. What we think as national cricketers is that we have to go back home and help them whatever way we can."

In Sri Lanka, cricket is "like a religion and people love the game and love the players as well". Kuruppu knows this: he was a cricket-mad kid in a poor but cricket-mad country who started playing for his school at the age of 9 and went on to play for his country.

"Cricket," he says, "has reached the world standard, so obviously people feel that it has brought honour to the country."

The honourable thing to do, in return, is to return.

Kuruppu and the team will offer to help, in whatever way they can, in the camps being set up for the homeless. You can tell he's itching to get on with it.

He, like the team - and notwithstanding his almost successful attempt to sideline his own feelings - are experiencing an awful sensation of being detached from their country.

"Here we are thousands of miles away and we are just sitting in front of television and just ... just ... watching it. Everyone in their rooms just watching CNN or BBC," he says opening his hands out in a gesture of absolute hopelessness. Just for a moment.

He does not give in easily to such indulgences. He has a job and he does it crisply and calmly. He wears, on his wrist, a scrap of white cotton, blessed and tied on before the tour by the Buddhist monks of his faith. He has got the team through safely this far, but is leaving nothing to chance.

He has calculated to the minute, without looking at his watch, when our time is up and he says firmly, with the first heartfelt smile of our time together, "Thank you, Michele."

As we leave, I say, "Have a safe flight," and he says, "Yes, thank you." He is polite to the last. But he says this with his back turned. He is over at the next table poring over those passports. He is taking solace in one of the ordinary tasks in the job description of a manager of a touring cricket team in an extraordinary situation.