Offsetting their flamboyant stroke-players and bewitching bowlers with their modesty and naivety, you have a cricketing culture that is a throwback to a more genteel sporting era. The annual match between the two oldest schools, Royal College and St Thomas's - a sort of Eton v Harrow for the subcontinent - is a three-day festival attracting vast crowds.
Carefree batsmen - minds and bodies untramelled by tomorrow flirt with danger and strive to entertain. Sometimes, they're just plain cheeky. There are bowlers with gangly limbs and rubbery wrists, swinging the ball this way, spinning it that. ``Muralitharan could turn it on the M4,'' says team manager Ranjith Fernando. England can leave their arm guards and chest pads in the dressing-room: to deal with this attack requires touch rather than tenacity. Lolloping about in the field, they are the complete antithesis of the South Africans, rarely diving, often just supplying an escort service to the boundary.
It has always been their way and a legion of imported coaches have struggled to change it. Maybe they shouldn't try. Sri Lankan cricket is rich in self-expression and non-conformism, an attitude that only two years ago won them the World Cup and last week saw England's one-day side off at a canter. Their cricket history should be chronicled under 'Tales of the Unexpected'.
I experienced the Sri Lankans' audacious approach to the game first-hand when I played a season there before they had become a Test-playing nation. One afternoon, my club were struggling to take wickets until our wicketkeeper, Russell Hamer, who kept for the national side, came up and told me to sling a fast yorker well down the leg side. After four fruitless hours in 90-degree heat and high humidity, you'll try anything to get a wicket, believe me, and I did as suggested. As I ran in to bowl, Hamer began sneaking up to the stumps from his position 15 yards back, unbeknown to the batsman, of course.
As the ball veered past his pads, the batsman, sensing another easy boundary, swished eagerly at it, but missed and overbalanced in his enthusiasm. Hamer, who had by now reached the stumps, gathered it one-handed and whipped the bails off in one flowing movement with the batsman out of his ground. The keeper beamed a 100-megawatt smile after a brilliant, instinctive act that he later repeated off other bowlers, and it remains the only time I ever got a batsman out stumped. Hamer is now head groundsman at one of Colombo's Test venues. One wonders what trickery he employs in that role.
Until a few years ago, most Sri Lankan cricket was played on jute matting. This, when pulled tight, induces astonishing bounce. Even a spinner can make the ball jump shoulder-high, which accounts for their batsmen's penchant for the pull and the cut. Nothing but a half volley will lure Aravinda de Silva forward. Even their turf wickets are lively, promoting a high degree of risk-taking, relatively low totals and spectacular dismissals conjured by an array of perplexing slow bowlers. Matches there make riveting viewing.
Sadly, their cricket remains underdeveloped. They remain impecunious and since their entry into the Test arena in 1981 they have played 86 Tests. England have had 168 in the same period and after this Oval Test, Sri Lanka will not play another for at least 12 months. Their learning curve is dipping, this is probably the weakest Test XI they have fielded and several of their stars will not be around much longer. The players are worried. ``There aren't that many good young players coming through,'' said de Silva. ``They need more exposure, particularly abroad.''
Sri Lanka's lack of commercial attraction is usually offered as the reason not to invite them to play overseas (interesting, then, that the Oval is sold out for the first three days of this Test and only 3,000 tickets remain for Sunday). It will be a shame if cynical business attitudes continue to hamper the progress of the most uncynical team in the world.