Centurion (South Africa)- One of the lasting memories of the limited overs series in Sri Lanka were the scenes from the opening matches of the Aiwa Cup: of Australia, confident and competent, wiping out Sri Lanka and India at the rain-splattered Galle international ground.

Standing on the impressive granite battlements of the more than 350-year-old fort at this compact seaside city gives you a privileged view and is about as unique as any you will come across where the game is played. Impressive and imposing the upper rockface was festooned with thousands of spectators, among whom on the top ramparts were a couple of Buddhist monks in their distinguished saffron robes.

Below, swirling grey white capped waves thrashed against water-smoothed chunks of jagged rock and gave this Test venue a special quality. Along with St John's in Antigua, the sea is as close as you are going to find it.

Lace sellers were not doing the brisk trade they had hoped and the fishermen were watching the game rather than try their luck in the choppy waters around the southern corner of the green pearl of the Indian Ocean. Gateway to the tropical south east coast, Galle marries the ancient and the modern in Sri Lanka history. It is known to have been a busy port for vessels plying the Middle East and Orient routes in the latter years of the Roman Empire and was settled by the Portuguese who laid the initial foundations of the fort around 1585. These were built over by the Dutch about 80 years later and the upper battlements of this massive open air Ngrandstand were finished around 1700.

The ground at Galle, once run by the southern region municipality is now owned by the Board of Control for Cricket in Sri Lanka, the only one they can call their own. There are indoor net facilities which are part of a new grandstand while outdoor nets are also being developed; part of the plan to turn Galle into a top international centre and spread the game in an area where growth has been encouraging.

And that this is going on while the BCCSL is being run by an interim committee of five committed men shows how the sport is progressing on the island without an elected board. In fact there is the distinct impression the Committee of Five is about the best solution to the on-going faction sniping among those who ran the board before the Minister of Sport, SB Dissanayake.

There is no doubt that he did not draw up a list of names, placed them in a hat and pulled out five lucky winners. It was not that simple. Someone, who had, or has, the ear of the president whispered them in the ear of Chandrika Kumaratunga, Otherwise, how come that men with such diverse backgrounds, and whose interests are in the growth of the game in Sri Lanka, find themselves on the committee.

Two of them, Sidath Wettimuny and Asantha de Mel, are part of the selection panel which challenged the iron-fisted rule of Arjuna Ranatunga, threw him out and reshaped the team with Sanath Jayasuriya as the new captain. As we all know, it is not a policy which has found universal favour, but beating Australia in the Aiwa Cup final has done much to silence ill-informed opinion.

What was fairly obvious in the build up to the Aiwa Cup and the product of eventual victory was how the five men have spread calm and given the BCCSL a new, clear direction. The regional squabbles and political knifing, leading to what became the discredited board election results of March 28 did a fair amount of damage to the image of the BCCSL. To minimise this the Interim Committee of Five, with the urbane banker, Rienzie Wijetilleke, as their chairman, have gone about the job of rebuilding public confidence and that in the affiliated regions to the extent that Maitland Place, where the board have their offices, is moving confidently towards the millennium year.

There is also an impression coming from players as well as top Colombo club administrators that it would be in the interests of the board and the game in Sri Lanka if the interim committee was retained for the next three years. They point to how squabbling among the regional politicians within the game showed they were far more interested in promoting their own interests to the detriment of the sport.

There is a distinct perception they are on a personal ego trip and have little to no interest outside the regions they represent. But being on the board has advantages when it comes to getting complimentary tickets to Test and LOI matches.

One case last year was how the representative from the outstation of Anuradhapura presented a facile argument for better toilet facilities for a ground of little standing and trying ride over the more serious matter of costs of scoreboard improvement at a Test venue such as Sinhalese Sports Club.

What we have in Sri Lanka is how five men have been placed on a committee to deal honestly with the problems created by political groups within the BCCSL and who see nothing wrong in wrecking the process of development and growth of the game. It is a problem which the board has had since the 1996 World Cup triumph and allowed to grow without finding a cure to the ills which the board had succumbed.

Now the interim five have created a climate of positive thinking and progressive growth: a pro-active approach which the regional politicians and bad news harbingers had overlooked because it did not serve their purpose but that of the board's.

The five under the astute leadership of Wijetilleke have done much to re-establish a board which having worked for the game could see all their work destroyed as soon as the court decides what is to be done from the fiasco of the non-election. If Sri Lanka are to achieve success on the field they need a firm controlling hand off it.

The sport has become such big business that most region representatives are out of touch with the way the modern game is run: they are amateurs in a highly skilled, professional society and should leave good management and decisions to those who know what they are doing. Interference could leave an ugly pimple on the face of the sport and scar it permanently.