Bloomfield Cricket and Athletic Club

Cricket in Ceylon organised itself around clubs long before independence, and Bloomfield belongs to that first wave: founded in 1892, it counts among the oldest such clubs still playing in Colombo. The ground it plays on today was not the first. The club started out in Pettah, moved to Campbell Park in Borella in 1923, and only in the 1970s settled into Cinnamon Gardens, where the Bloomfield Cricket and Athletic Club Ground now holds 2,000 spectators under the club's emerald green.

First-class status came in 1994, but by then Bloomfield had already been winning the island's premier competition for three decades under its various names — the P Saravanamuttu Trophy among them. Eight titles in that competition run from 1963-64 to 2024-25, the 1994-95 season shared with Sinhalese Sports Club.

What the club is known for beyond silverware is the players who passed through it on their way to the Sri Lankan national side. Sanath Jayasuriya and Lasith Malinga both came up through Bloomfield, and Angelo Mathews and Tillakaratne Dilshan wore the emerald green as well, giving the club a claim on Sri Lankan cricket's modern history well beyond its own trophy cabinet.

Across Colombo, that history has long been measured against Colombo Cricket Club, the club Bloomfield has treated as its fiercest local opponent for decades.