Siddarth Ravindran, from cricinfo.com, under a different title
The Cricket Stadium in Hambantota district, just off the south-eastern coast of Sri Lanka, is an anomaly among venues for the 2011 World Cup. Most other grounds for cricket’s showpiece event are in big urban centres like Chennai, Colombo and Chittagong, but the closest settlement to the Hambantota stadium is Sooriyawewa, a nondescript, largely one-street village eight kilometres away.
It is an odd location for one of the two splashy new stadiums (the other is in Pallekele, near Kandy) being built for the World Cup in Sri Lanka, both completely owned by the country’s cricket board. Six hours away from the nearest commercial airport, with hardly any hotels around, and with no identified domestic first-class team to use the stadium as a home ground (Ruhuna, the local side in the inter-provincial tournament, use the perfectly adequate Galle stadium, a Test venue, as their base).
SEE http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/fishing-town-to-financial-biggie/ for the rest of the article under its original title.