Janaka Malwatta
There's an international cricketer in my back garden
When the likes of Sri Lanka toured three decades ago, they depended a fair amount on the goodwill of the diaspora
Janaka Malwatta
30-Sep-2015
Last month, in a windswept Melbourne suburb, I caught up with Athula Samarasekera. It was a reunion 32 years in the making. The last time we met, I was a 15-year-old schoolboy, and he a 22-year-old cricketer on his first overseas tour, with the 1983 Sri Lankan World Cup squad. There's nothing particularly unusual in a schoolboy meeting a cricketing hero, but the circumstances that led to that meeting tell their own story.
In 1983, just two years after being granted full Test status, Sri Lanka was an impoverished cricket nation. The precarious financial footing of the board had ramifications for every aspect of the tour. The World Cup squad comprised the manager, the assistant manager and the team. The board barely had enough money for three-star hotels. The team had the challenge of conducting a World Cup campaign within straitened means while adapting to cricket in foreign conditions. For Athula, who shared a room with Brendon Kuruppu, also on his first tour, the challenges started early.
"We missed our first team meeting," he recalled. Although aware there was a time difference between Colombo and London, they had forgotten to adjust their watches. Jet-lagged, the two woke late on their first evening in England and, with no prospect of a meal in the hotel, set out to forage. Richmond in the 1980s was not a hotbed of late-night eateries. The only food they could find was a pie at a petrol station. Pies are hardly a staple of Sri Lankan cooking. "We didn't know what it was," smiled Athula. With an apprehensive kapang bang - just eat it - they ventured into new territory.
Full postThe unforgettable Sanath cut
Remembering a ferocious Jayasuriya shot that became of symbol of the magic summer of 1998
Janaka Malwatta
16-Aug-2015
Certain strokes give us a window into a player's character. Take Mahela Jayawardene's late cut. Jayawardene watched the ball turn towards him, waiting until it seemed it must inevitably cannon into the stumps, before, at the last possible moment, caressing it towards the boundary. It was undeniably a thing of beauty, an act of bravura, but above all, it was a touch shot. Jayawardene was the most intuitive of cricketers, whether at the crease or as captain, and this single stroke revealed his instinctive approach for all to see.
On rare occasions, a rendition of a stroke is so forceful, so compelling, that it remains in the mind, a lasting testament to the player who conceived it. At Old Trafford, during his epoch-marking 189 not out in May 1984, Viv Richards picked up a good-length ball by Derek Pringle from outside off stump and flicked it nonchalantly over long-on for six. That tableau - Richards' casual flick of the bat, the long-on fielder scrambling helplessly after a ball that sailed serenely over him, Pringle's head slumping between his shoulders - perfectly encapsulated Richards' mastery of England that day.
Sanath Jayasuriya played such a match-defining shot during Sri Lanka's 1998 Test victory at The Oval. Despite Jayasuriya's first-innings double-hundred and Muttiah Muralitharan's 16-wicket haul, the detail that lives most vividly in my memory is a stroke played in the second innings. With a paltry target of 36 runs, Sri Lanka's second innings was a formality. That single shot, a six over point played with both feet off the ground, not only revealed Jayasuriya's mindset - uninhibited and dismissive - it displayed his unorthodoxy, his daring, and his calculated savagery.
Full postWhat might Gehan Mendis have been?
An attacking batsman who made a name for himself on the county circuit in the '70s and '80s, he could have played for Sri Lanka or England but finished without an international cap
Janaka Malwatta
03-May-2015
The English county cricket season has cranked creakily into gear. Sparsely filled grounds have seen the reappearance of that quixotic creature, the county cricketer. The more fortunate among them have returned, like migratory birds, from southern winters. One and all, they have donned thick sweaters against crisp April mornings, rubbed life into cold hands, and taken to the field.
Kumar Sangakkara has started his latest stint in county cricket in imperious fashion, carving out a century and a fifty in swift order. In so doing, he has joined the long line of Sri Lankan cricketers who have graced county cricket, stretching back almost a hundred years. There have been some towering characters among them.
The first on the list came with the resplendent name Churchill Hector Gunasekara. He had attended Cambridge University to study medicine, missed out on a Blue due to the outbreak of war, and consoled himself with a three-year career for Middlesex between 1919 and 1922.
Full postAll hail Mad Max
Aravinda de Silva's steely resolve at the crease, as demonstrated in the 1996 World Cup final, coupled with his vintage strokeplay made him the first true Sri Lankan great
Janaka Malwatta
08-Mar-2015
Aravinda de Silva was Sri Lanka's first international cricketing superstar. Before Sanga, before Mahela, before Murali, before Sanath, there was Aravinda. Diminutive, effortlessly graceful, equally adept in Test and ODI arenas, he was a batsman for the ages. His tale, like those of so many of cricket's artists, is not captured by facts and figures alone. He did score 6361 Test runs, the fourth-highest aggregate for a Sri Lankan, including 20 centuries. He also has 9284 ODI runs and over a hundred ODI wickets. But the true measure of his career is in the memories he has left us.
Aravinda was born to play cricket. "Cricketer was written all over him - in his walk, in the way he took guard, in his stand at the wicket," wrote PG Wodehouse of the eponymous hero of his novel Mike at Wrykyn. "On the cricket field, he could not have looked anything but a cricketer if he had turned out in a tweed suit and hobnail boots." Those words could have been written for Aravinda de Silva.
A short man - he was 5ft 4in - Aravinda's bat always looked disproportionately long, as if he had borrowed his big brother's when he wasn't looking. But what magic he conjured with it. Like most men of his stature, Aravinda was an expert puller and cutter. But allied to these power shots were late cuts of the utmost delicacy, leg glances of indescribable finesse, rapier-like cover drives, impossibly angled square drives. Aravinda scored all round the wicket without slogging: classically correct cricket shots executed with precision and panache. He was the RK Narayan of cricket. Narayan's liquid prose is so smooth, so polished, it feels like a miracle of nature. Aravinda at the crease was Narayan in Malgudi.
Full postThe last of Sanga
Kumar Sangakkara has maintained excellent standards over a glittering career; a World Cup trophy would be a fitting send-off
Janaka Malwatta
31-Jan-2015
Kumar Sangakkara's stellar ODI career is approaching its final denouement. He has already played his last ODI in Sri Lanka. It is very much hoped that he will continue to grace Test cricket yet a while, but after the current tour of New Zealand and the small matter of a World Cup, his ODI adventure will be over.
It has been quite some ride. As Sangakkara has grown into his game, his performances have reached stratospheric levels. The statistics are mind-boggling. In 2014, he scored 2868 runs across the three formats of international cricket, beating Ricky Ponting's record for runs scored in a calendar year. He has scored over 1000 runs in ODIs in a calendar year for the last four years running, and has done so six times in total. He has accumulated 13,580 ODI runs, which puts him third on the all-time list. He has 20 ODI hundreds and a staggering 93 ODI fifties. He has 472 ODI dismissals to his name, 376 as wicketkeeper, including 96 stumpings. He has won, among others, the ICC's ODI Cricketer of the Year award in 2011 and 2013, and the Man of the Match in the 2014 World T20 final.
Sangakkara is a cricketer created rather than born. He was, in fact, a schoolboy tennis prodigy, and concentrated on cricket relatively late in the day. He might lack the natural talent of Aravinda de Silva or the intuitive brilliance of Mahela Jayawardene, but through sheer will and an immense capacity for hard work, Sangakkara has made himself the most successful batsman Sri Lanka has produced.
Full postA maverick with maturity
Tillakaratne Dilshan, one the few '90s era cricketers still around, is an entertainer who never backs down from a challenge
Janaka Malwatta
29-Dec-2014
It is almost unimaginable that another Sri Lankan would upstage Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara during their last ODI on home soil. But Tillakaratne Dilshan, the third member of the triumvirate of Sri Lankan ODI greats coming to the end of their splendiferous careers, has done exactly that. With a hundred, three wickets, and a characteristically crackerjack performance in the field, Dilshan showcased his skills across all three disciplines. He is a rare and unrestrained talent.
Dilshan, son of a Malay father and a Sinhalese mother, is another emblem of Sri Lanka's rich and complex ethnic make-up, embodied time and again by the national team. He made his international debut in 1999. It is something of an irony that Dilshan, limited-overs cricketer par excellence, is one of the handful of international cricketers left who made their debut in the days of the unquestioned primacy of Test cricket.
Dilshan's rise to pre-eminence occurred during the middle and later years of his career, and owed much to his move up the batting order in 2009, a full ten years after his debut. He was never entirely convincing as a middle-order bat, but as an opener he has been electrifying, destructive, and feared. He took up where Sanath Jayasuriya left off, and Jayasuriya is the only Sri Lankan ODI opener who could be ranked above him.
Full postSri Lanka need to trust their own
There's still a tendency to look overseas when it comes to picking the coach. Are there grounds for this?
Janaka Malwatta
26-Oct-2014
After months of unseemly delay, Marvan Atapattu was confirmed as the Sri Lanka national head coach last month. On the face of it, it is hard to see why there was such hesitation to appoint him. A successful international cricketer in his own right, Atapattu is a former Sri Lankan captain. His tenure was marked by a calm authority, redolent of his assured batting style - there was a time when he seemed to score double-hundreds for fun. Given the defection of Paul Farbrace, Atapattu's often-expressed keenness for the job is by no means insignificant, and his own coaching record is impressive. He recently led the most successful tour Sri Lanka have ever undertaken to England, with victories in the Test, ODI and T20 formats, an unprecedented across-the-board triumph. Whether the arcane and inexplicable intricacies of Sri Lankan cricket politics were at play in the reluctance to appoint him full-time coach is anyone's guess. An alternative explanation could lie in the allure of that most divisive of figures, the overseas coach.
The attraction lies in the fact that developing countries, which lack indigenous expertise, seek short cuts to progress by "purchasing" knowledge. A plethora of African countries have done this for their national football teams, to the extent that almost every African country to successfully compete at a World Cup seems to have had a Belgian, Serbian or Brazilian hired gun leading them. Nor have Sri Lankans been shy of seeking employment in this fashion, as evidenced by Pubudu Dassanayake's tenure in Nepal, or Roy Dias' appointment in Malaysia. It is a sensible and mutually beneficial arrangement.
Of course, in the category of overseas coaches are the stellar performers. Think of Fabio Capello, that great Italian, who managed England's football team. A man of unquestionable stature, he commanded respect even from England's fabulously wealthy and famously pampered footballers. In cricketing terms, Gary Kirsten is his equivalent, adroitly and successfully managing the superstars of Indian cricket. Duncan Fletcher of Zimbabwe had a successful tenure as England coach.
Full postA man of his people
Mahela Jayawardene embodies artistry and steel in his batting, and warmth and humanity off the field
Janaka Malwatta
18-Jul-2014
A gentle pall of sadness hangs over the cricket lovers of my country. Mahela Jayawardene, that prince of batsmen, has announced his retirement from Test cricket. We knew this day would come, but like with the passing of a venerable patriarch, anticipated with a mixture of dread and inevitability, it brings a diminution of the spirits. In the rich firmament of Sri Lankan cricket, Mahela is one of the brightest stars, taking his place with the very best our nation has produced: Aravinda de Silva, Muttiah Muralitharan, and his old comrade in arms Kumar Sangakkara.
The name DPMD Jayawardene has been a source of calm and comfort in the Sri Lankan middle order for the last 17 years, like the reassuring presence of a much-loved uncle. Mahela has been playing Test cricket for so long, his career overlaps those of Mohammad Azharuddin, Inzamam-ul-Haq, and Mark Waugh, notable artists all. Like them, he is a purist's batsman, a rapier among the blunderbusses. He has always conjured up a past era, and not simply because of the longevity of his career. In the effortless elegance of his strokeplay, in his innate humility and grace, he most closely resembles those two great gentlemen of South Asian cricket, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman. While the three of them bestrode the cricketing turf, it felt as if we had a connection to that romanticised age long before the DRS and T20. With Mahela's retirement, that link is broken.
Mahela made his debut a year after Sri Lanka's breakthrough World Cup win, in a team packed with batting talent. Aravinda in his pomp, Sanath Jayasuriya, Arjuna Ranatunga, Marvan Atapattu. Add Murali and Chaminda Vaas, it's a veritable roll call of Sri Lankan luminaries, a formidable team for a 20-year-old to force his way into. But Mahela was a prodigious and precocious talent. A fixture in his school first XI from the age of 14, he has gone on to compile 11,493 Test runs, which leaves him sixth in the all-time standings, with 33 hundreds and a triple-century to his name. His razor-sharp reflexes have also pouched 197 outfield catches, a tally beaten only by Dravid and Jacques Kallis.
Full postSri Lanka's triumph of attitude
They won in England by playing tough, bloody-minded cricket, refusing to take a backward step, on or off the pitch
Janaka Malwatta
03-Jul-2014
What a battle. What an epic struggle. This was bare-knuckle stuff. For ten days and 30 sessions, two teams hammered at each other. The triumph, in the last few minutes of a three-week contest, demonstrated once again that nothing has the capacity to deliver drama and tension like the slow burn of Test cricket. This historic Test series victory may in the long run be of more significance to Sri Lanka than the World T20 victory in Bangladesh. The win proved they can succeed outside Asia in the most important format of the game.
Sri Lanka won by playing tough, bloody-minded cricket, refusing to take a backward step, on or off the pitch. Their attitude alone is worthy of celebration. The tone was set by the captain. Angelo Mathews demonstrated grace under fire in dealing with the controversies around Jos Buttler's dismissal and Sachithra Senanayake's action. If anything, those controversies strengthened his and the team's resolve. Mathews was also willing to mix it with his opponents, in the vanguard of verbal salvos fired at Joe Root during the final innings at Headingley.
Importantly, he was able to take it as well as dish it out, compiling a composed 42 runs in the final ODI, when every Englishman and his dog was baying for his head.
Full postTesting times for Sri Lanka
Given Sri Lanka's long struggle to attain Test status, the demotion of the five-day format to an inconvenient sideshow is particularly galling
Janaka Malwatta
01-Jun-2014
Sri Lanka are well into their tour of England and Ireland, but the real meat of the tour is yet to start. On June 12, Sri Lanka will play England at Lord's in the first match of that latter-day abomination, a two-Test series.
Sri Lanka suffered the indignity of desultory single-Test tours for almost 20 years, before the ECB deigned to grant them a Test series in 2002, six years after Sri Lanka had thrashed England on their way to winning the World Cup. For a brief period Sri Lanka played three-match Test series against England, a format that allows a narrative between the two teams to develop, and, more often than not, leaves a clear victor. But, regrettably, the hideous compromise of the two-Test series seems to have become firmly established, a victim of the rise of the T20 game and the bottom line.
Given the long struggle to attain Test status - and no country had to wait as long for the honour as Sri Lanka - the demotion of Test cricket to an inconvenient sideshow is particularly galling. Truth be told, Sri Lanka have played Tests so infrequently of late, it could reasonably be asked whether they deserve to be called a Test nation at all. In 2013, Sri Lanka played a total of three full Test matches. Let me repeat that. The national side played a grand total of 14 days of Test cricket in the entire calendar year. It is as embarrassing as it is pitiful.
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