There are 15 Sri Lanka players at The Oval, including a captain who gave them a rare away Test series win against England here a couple of years ago. In Dinesh Chandimal they have a gem of a player, who the entire team is hoping will one day become a stalwart. But the best Sri Lankan batsman in England right now is not even part of the team. He hasn’t been overlooked or dropped. The man in question retired a good couple of years back.
But Kumar Sangakkara, 39, is still batting as well as he ever has, for Surrey. In the ongoing County Championship, he has scored five successive centuries, including a double, and also witnessed his beloved team get out for 203 against South Africa after a good start. They had an opportunity to enhance reputations against the Proteas, but the young and inexperienced batting department blew it away.
On Wednesday, captain Angelo Mathews was asked if he bothered asking Sangakkara, whether he fancied coming out of retirement.
Although in a lighter note, this is what he had to say, “I always asked him that. Even a couple of days ago, I asked him ‘can you come and play for us, you know, in this game?’ He’s been in absolute form. He’s been in form ever since he started playing, to be honest. Yes, he’s had a dream career, and it’s unfortunate that we don’t have him anymore, but he’s always willing to help. He’s always having chats on how we should play in these conditions. It’s his home ground. He speaks to everyone, including me. It’s very tempting to call him back again,” Mathews said.
Maybe he didn’t mean it, but there is every reason for him to think about it seriously. Since the 2015 World Cup, the team has lost Tillakaratne Dilshan and middle-order heavyweights in Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene, other than the 21 of 39 ODIs they have played. Of those, 13 wins came against Zimbabwe, West Indies and Ireland. Mathews was asked if Chamara Kapugedera was fit, a batsman who since debut in 2006, still doesn’t have a three-figure score and averages 21.24 in 98 ODIs. In any other team, he would have been shunted out by now. But at 30 he has got another opportunity to revive not only his career, but also that of his team.
Sri Lanka knew they had to go through a rebuilding phase, but this is becoming a bit too long. After the retirement of some of their greats, what they have built so far has not been able to withstand the vagaries of international cricket. “We are in the rebuilding phase for the past one or two years. I mean, yes, we’ve had so many greats and they’ve retired. We are slowly rebuilding. But surely, we will come up with a good performance,” Mathews said.
Though this has been one of the most asked questions to Mathews, what is also striking is that he finds it tough to answer. That is how it has been for him, probably the only player in this lot who can walk into another team. “It’s a very hard question. It comes only with experience. Most of the guys haven’t played a lot of international cricket. The more you play, the more you learn. Yes, it’s a very tough question. You never know. But it’s just that we’ve got to keep learning every single day, and everyone has to step up with their roles because we can’t just expect things to fall in line. We’ve got to make it happen, and we’ve got to make it happen soon,” he said.