Sri Lanka Cricket is once again being run from outside its own boardroom. After president Shammi Silva and his executive committee resigned on April 28, 2026, the island’s sports ministry moved the following day to place the governing body under a restructuring committee, with former opposition parliamentarian Eran Wickramaratne installed as chairman. The committee’s membership reads like a who’s who of Sri Lankan cricket’s modern history, including Kumar Sangakkara, Roshan Mahanama, Sidath Wettimuny and several other former players and administrators.
The resignation under pressure
Silva’s exit did not come voluntarily in the usual sense. Sri Lanka’s president had asked him to step down over longstanding allegations of corruption and mismanagement, and Silva ultimately convened a special meeting to announce his resignation with 11 months still remaining in his fourth two-year term as SLC president. His departure, and that of his entire executive committee, cleared the way for the government to install an interim administration the very next day, with all of SLC’s administrative functions temporarily brought under the sports ministry.
A crisis with a trigger point
The immediate backdrop to the upheaval was Sri Lanka’s early exit from the T20 World Cup it co-hosted with India in February and March 2026, a tournament defeat on home soil that intensified scrutiny of the board’s administration at exactly the moment the country’s cricket was under the global spotlight. That disappointment did not create the underlying governance concerns on its own, but it gave critics of Silva’s leadership a concrete, recent failure to point to alongside the older corruption allegations.
Who is actually running the show now
Wickramaratne, a former member of parliament for the Samagi Jana Balawegaya party, was named chairman of the new Sri Lanka Cricket Restructuring Committee. He said upon taking the role that the committee’s immediate priority was ‘a total overhaul of the governance framework at SLC,’ a statement that frames the committee’s mandate as structural reform rather than simply caretaker administration until elections can be held. Sangakkara and Mahanama’s inclusion gives the committee direct cricketing credibility that purely political appointees would lack, a detail the ministry appeared keen to emphasise given the circumstances of the takeover.
The ICC’s uncomfortable history here
Government intervention in SLC has happened before, and it has not gone unpunished. The ICC suspended Sri Lanka Cricket’s membership in November 2023, citing political interference in the running of the local board, only reinstating it after assurances about administrative independence. The ICC’s governing rules, specifically Article 2.4(d), take a hard line against government bodies taking direct control of national federations, which makes this latest takeover — however justified its proponents consider it on anti-corruption grounds — a potential flashpoint with the sport’s global governing body all over again.
Reform versus risk: the two readings
Supporters of the takeover argue that SLC’s governance problems had become severe enough, and persistent enough across multiple administrations, that external intervention was the only realistic path to the kind of structural overhaul Wickramaratne has promised — pointing to the credibility of appointees like Sangakkara as evidence this is reform-minded rather than purely political. Critics, including voices sympathetic to the ICC’s historical position, warn that each cycle of government takeover in Sri Lankan cricket has tended to trade one set of problems for the risk of international sanction, and that an interim committee answerable to a sports ministry is still, by the ICC’s own definition, government interference — regardless of how respected its individual members are.
What happens from here
The restructuring committee’s task now is to conduct whatever financial and administrative review justified Silva’s removal, draft a new constitution or governance framework for SLC, and eventually hand administration back to an elected board without triggering the kind of ICC suspension the country endured in 2023. How long that process takes, and whether the ICC views this committee’s composition and mandate as different enough from past interventions to avoid sanction, will shape Sri Lankan cricket’s administrative stability heading into the back half of the current World Test Championship cycle.
For Sri Lanka’s national players, the immediate concern is less about boardroom politics than about continuity: contracts, tour planning and domestic structures all run through the same administration now under restructuring, and previous periods of governance upheaval in Sri Lankan cricket have coincided with disrupted player payments and uncertain scheduling. Sangakkara and Mahanama’s presence on the committee is partly meant to reassure current players that someone who has worn the national colours understands those stakes, even as the broader institutional reset plays out above their heads.
Photo: 8268513 / PIXABAY via Pixabay