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THE HISTORY OF TEA AND CRICKET IN SRI LANKA – BY David Colin Thome   Source: History of Ceylon Tea “You will think I write a lot about the scenery, but if you saw it you would not think I said too much” – James Taylor (Pioneering tea planter describing Ceylon in a letter to his father in Scotland in 1858) In Sri Lanka, the relevance of tea to the game of cricket extends further than that of a twenty-minute break that separates lunch and the end of a day’s play. And while tea to the Western world is but a tiny item in a crowded shopping trolley of groceries, in Sri Lanka, it is the trolley itself. For over a century, ‘Ceylon Tea’ has been the backbone of the country’s economy and to many individual Sri Lankans, its significance looms even larger. To the poorest of the poor, a ...