With a 124 years of a rich history, Zahira College, Colombo is one of the oldest cricket playing schools in Sri Lanka, having produced talented cricketers who have constantly represented local and overseas clubs and mercantile organizations, the Past 1st XI Cricketers’ Association also known as PCA have now set a challenge for themselves to produce a national cricketer in 5 years.
PCA is the representative body of past cricketers of Zahira College, founded in 2015. At present we have more than 150 members registered and expecting to double the membership after the tournament.
The tournament will be taking place on Sunday, the 24th of July at college grounds from 8.30 am onwards.
President of PCA, Mazhar Zuhair believes, That Zairians’ have always been passionate sportsmen, inspired by our constant dominance in the game of soccer and sheer hard work and effort put into our rugby which has resulted in us regaining “A” Division status after 14 long years, Mazhar is confident that they can support college to re-ignite it’s cricket standards like in the mid 80’s and 90’s where Zahira regularly featured amongst the top 5 schools in rankings.
In the recent past, though Zahira often produced an outstanding player every now and then, we have somehow not been able to find a way to win matches. Our objective in organizing this event for the 2nd consecutive year is to bring together all the past cricketers in order to align their support to strengthen and elevate the standard of college cricket to be amongst the best in Sri Lanka thus achieving our 5 year vision which will be a benchmark thereafter” says Mazhar.
Considering the overwhelming success we had with the inaugural tournament last year where we had 12 teams comprising of 120 elite talented players representing a wide age group, the organizing committee has decided to increase the number of teams to 16 enabling more than 160 players to participate.
Project Chairman Basheer Bongso who captained the college cricket team in 1992 is thrilled with the support and encouragement he has been getting from the organizing committee and from members and especially from sponsors. Mobil Lubricants of McLaren’s Group has come forward as the principal sponsor while Home Depot and Dialog Enterprise are the co-sponsors of this event.
