The Cricketer
Chandra Schaffter
Chandra Schaffter opened the bowling for Ceylon against England in 1954. He recalls a period when club cricket in Sri Lanka was organised almost entirely along communal lines: Sinhalese, Tamil, Moor, Burgher, Malay, Parsi, Bohra. Membership was often restricted to those of a particular community.
Yet he remembers these divisions not as sites of hostility but as the basis for what he describes as “the friendliest rivalry that one could see.” The clubs were social spaces as well as sporting institutions. They nurtured talent, sustained competition and, in his account, gave shape to Sri Lankan cricket.
Over time, membership rules relaxed. Performance demanded openness. The clubs changed, as the country did.
I met Chandra Schaffter at the Tamil Union Sports Club. For nearly forty years, it had been the only ground in the country equipped to host international matches, with a covered pavilion and a manual scoreboard that, he told me, the Madras Cricket Association later copied. This was where he opened the bowling for Ceylon in 1954. He had been a member ever since.
His family history traced another journey. His grandfather, Peter Adolphus, had come from southern India in 1870 as a catechist assisting a missionary priest named Schaffter on the plantations. The family retained the priest’s name. Settlement, faith and migration were woven quietly into the story of cricket.
We walked through the pavilion corridors past photographs and names of former Tamil Union players. I asked him what he thought now of clubs once organised along ethnic lines. To me, such structures seemed exclusionary. He did not agree. The rules had relaxed over time, he said, and that was natural. But in his view the clubs had sustained the game and built its standards.
Later, I stepped onto the grounds and spoke with the staff who maintained the pitch and operated the old scoreboard. Like the players today, they came from different communities. The pavilion held layers of history at once.
Colombo
February 21, 2012
Transcript and translations
Language
"The basic requirement for a selector is honesty"
I think you look for skill in a player. My view always is that somebody who does well in club cricket is not necessarily a good international cricketer. There are two different levels of cricket and you may score hundreds and hundreds of runs in club cricket, but that doesn’t make you, in my view, an international cricket. And I take the British or the English county averages as an example. You’ll find that the first six batsmen or the first six bowlers don’t play for England. It’s the others who do.
So you look for talent. You look for what you would call, I think, promise. If I feel that a cricketer shows promise, that he has the right temperament, I would back him to play. And of course then he has to go and perform. And during the time I was the selector, I think we took a lot of gambles. We selected a lot of players who were very young. We played Anura Tennekoon, I think when he was a schoolboy. We made Michael Tissera captain over C.I. Gunasekera who was almost double his age… well not double his age but certainly 15 years older than him amidst a lot of controversy. But Michael Tissera became one of the best captains Sri Lanka ever had. Anura Tennekoon became one of the best batsmen we’ve ever had. And we gave opportunities to a lot of outstation players at that time and I think they all came good.
I think that the basic requirement for a selector is honesty. I think you have to be honest and do what your conscience or your knowledge tells you you should do. That is very, very important. And as a selector I never allowed anybody to influence me because you cannot tolerate influence if you are a selector.
I think there is plenty of talent in Sri Lanka. I think we have good cricketers and I think that we have a large number of cricketers from whom we could draw. I would say selections are not always the best, but I certainly feel that by and large, they are fair. By and large they are fair.
Unfortunately, one…there is the impression nowadays that politicians get involved in selections. We have an unfortunate situation in this country where the team has to be approved by the minister and that’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing at all because you have somebody who hasn’t played the game deciding who should play and that is is bad for the morale of a team and bad for the sport itself.
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