Australian cricketers will tour Northern Sri Lanka

In early July for the first time since the end of the bloody civil war that gripped Sri Lanka for nearly 30 years, a foreign cricket team will be touring the North of the country.It might only be a combined under 18 side from Melbourne's Ferntree Gully District Cricket Association and the Australian Hellenic Federation.

However the players in the Northern Region have been starved for cricket for so long, they are ready to take on all comers and the Australian boys are ready to take on the locals.

It is only fitting that after an entire generation of kids in the north missed out on playing the game, it will be a team of young schoolboys from Melbourne who are sowing the first seeds to foreign cricket reconciliation. It's rather ironic to note that one of the boys to join the Hellenic Federation team is Akat Mayoum, a refugee himself from war torn Sudan.

Teams from Ferntree Gully and Yarra Valley have toured Sri Lanka 6 times, with the help of David Cruse from G'day Lanka, some of the boys were here at the height of the war, but this is the first time they have been able to venture North.

They keep returning to play cricket against the local schoolboy teams because of the passion and commitment these kids show towards the game.

Both Ferntree Gully and Yarra Valley have long had an affinity with Sri Lankan cricket with no less than 7 former players from the National

Team playing for these two associations. The likes of Roshan Mahanama, now an ICC match referee, Dulip Samaraweera whose brother Thilan was injured in the Pakistan terror attack, Kosala Kuruppuarachchi, J.C. Gamage, Ruwan Kalpage, Ishara Amarasinghe and Prabath Nissanka have all spent time playing in Australia at local level.

The Foundation of Goodness will be hosting a game for the Australian team in Killinochchi today. A seven-hour bus journey from Colombo will take the boys to meet Combined North/ East side on July 1st.

Kushil Gunasekera who runs The Foundation has been instrumental in rebuilding the lives of people in the Southern regions of Sri Lanka after the devastating Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004.

He is now working his way through in the Northern Province with the help of Murali and Kumar Sangakkara who are also trustees of The Foundation.

Murali, Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene have gone a long way to help rebuild the ties that bind the country through cricket. Last year they staged the Murali Harmony Cup.

A T20 under 19 tournament with the support of the Sri Lankan Army. Members of the force built a new ground and facilities at Oddusudan, near Mullaitivu which once staged one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

The grounds were built in record time and the support received from the Army further shows the steps being taken to try and bring the country together again.