Sri Lanka have been playing Test cricket for 25 years with extraordinary success, but with an old-fashioned, essentially amateur system based on the strength of school and club cricket. That is about to change. The Times can reveal that a revamped domestic structure, based on only five provincial teams, each with their own sponsor and separate organisation, is about to replace the 20-club “Premier” tournament of recent years.

Far greater prize-money than has been available in the country’s domestic game will be offered under the sponsorship of Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT). The SLT 5elevens tournaments will begin as 50-overs matches starting at the end of this month, with $1,500 (about £750) to each member of the winning squad. A Twenty20 competition will follow in May and the first fully professional four-day competition will start either late next year or early in 2009, depending on international commitments.

The radical reorganisation is the brainchild of the widely respected and, crucially, apolitical Sidath Wettimuny, who scored 190 in Sri Lanka’s first Test at Lord’s in 1984. His new structure, fully endorsed — and secretly planned in cahoots with senior players such as Mahela Jayawardena, Kumar Sangakkara and Sanath Jayasuriya — will reduce the influence of the clubs in Colombo and encourage local affiliations by players who previously had to travel to the capital if they wanted international recognition.

The SLT 5elevens competitions will form the basis of national selection. Each of the five provinces will initially be led by a household cricketing name, but the revolution will go much deeper than professional cricket. Each of the regions will have an operations manager whose job will be to coordinate coaching, schools and club cricket, sponsorship, physiotherapy, medical back-up and all the other trappings of “centres of excellence” in other countries, each based at a ground with professional facilities.

There may in time be more than five centres, depending largely on whether those Tamils isolated to the north of the island in Jaffna by the civil war can be assimilated. At present, there will be two Colombo teams: North Colombo, led by Chaminda Vaas, based at the Premadasa Stadium, and South Colombo, led by Tillekeratne Dilshan, based at Moratuwa. The South, based in Galle, will be led by Jayasuriya; the Kandy (hill country) district by Sangakkara, based at the new dry-weather ground in Pallekella; and the North Western area around Dambulla by Jayawardena, centred at Welagedera Stadium in Kurunegala.

The basis of Sri Lanka’s recent success has been the phenomenal Muttiah Muralitharan and planning for life without him is the main concern of those who look to the future. No matter how successful the new system, it will never produce another Muralitharan, but it may unearth more unorthodox cricketers and it will surely provide a better means of nurturing all the talent available.