COLOMBO: First went Rahul Dravid. The Wall. Ricky Ponting was next. The Punter. Then Sachin Tendulkar. The Little Master. Then departed Jacques Kallis. All-rounder nonpareil. To their immortal world has now gone Kumar Sangakkara. Just Sanga.
Or Sanga the phenomenon — the word in its fullest sense and widest limits — for linguistic embellishment. The phenomenon that can’t be explained through the body of runs he has collated — 12,400 in Tests, 14234 in ODIs and 1382 in T20s — or the catches he has taken or the stumpings he has affected or the matches and trophies he has won. For it takes out of equation, Sanga the humanist, Sanga the rhetorician, Sanga the thinker. The Sanga portrait is never complete with mundane stats or numbers. Perhaps, more than any other cricketer this century has beheld.
The last 29 minutes of his cricketing life didn’t go according to the perfect script. His team’s fortunes were hinged on him. To win it they needed Sanga. To draw it they needed Sanga. But how remorseless can cricketing gods be! For all it lasted was 29 minutes, 29 fleeting minutes. The last innings, perhaps, more than any of his 232 others, would have passed on like a blur.
But those 18 balls he faced, there was hope, the distant hope of a fairytale, the hope of one last feat from a man who has conjured up several such feats. The first ball he faced, to the man that was to be his nemesis, Sanga strode to the pitch of it and smothered it to the leg. Two runs. A single, four overthrows, a prospective run out that could have been as farcical as unfortunate end to his career, the Sanga machine was striding and gliding fluently. Two boundaries, two Sanga-esque boundaries, the first a tuck of his pads and then that punch through mid-off, you could sense a fairytale unfolding.
And then he was gone, gone as the way he had always seemed he would, snared by the first slip off Ravichandran Ashwin, the third identical dismissal of the series. Then the silence.
The interminable silence of a few hundred hearts wilting. Sanga the batsman, you would never see. But the Sanga story is far from over. Or complete.