When Fernando Sugath arrived in Lebanon in the mid-1990s, cricket was an underground sport. Literally. After living in Beirut for a year as one of the country’s 80,000 Sri Lankan migrant workers, a fellow countryman he met in a supermarket invited him to a game. “I had been looking for somewhere to play,” says Sugath. “Also, I didn’t have any friends.” He turned up at the address he was given to discover the players crammed into a tiny underground car park beneath an apartment building.
Sugath is a man used to improvising. “As kids we didn’t need a big playing area or good equipment to play,” he says. “We used plastic balls, the old base of a coconut leaf for a bat.” Within 10 years, he had founded Nomads CC, who played in another, open-air car park behind a Jesuit church. Sugath was the captain, star batter and organiser extraordinaire.
