Cricketer Walks Off, but Gentleman Legacy Stays On
COLOMBO: It was 12.34 pm. India had plucked the final Sri Lankan wicket to complete a series-leveling win. It was confirmed that Kumar Sangakkara would end his career on a somber note, much like the grim clouds that had spread over the P Sara Oval. Virat Kohli and Co suppressed their emotions. The enormity of the occasion was not lost on them—it was Sangakkara’s final day of international cricket, and wild celebratory routines weren’t the afternoon’s theme.
From the narrow steps emerged Sangakkara, the stadium’s collective gaze converging at him. Hugs, handshakes, applause—that perhaps must have been a moment he must have felt weird, even uncomfortable. For he is not used to such excesses of emotions. Maybe, at the moment must have dawned the reality that he is no longer an international cricketer. Something he has been for 15 years. Now, he has lapsed into the legion of former cricketers, but his place guaranteed among the pantheon of greats, among the Bradmans, Gavaskars and Tendulkars.
The exact moment of realisation, by his admission, came the previous day, when the Indian cricketers embraced him after getting out. “It never hits you until the end comes and you finish the cricket and then you are out there talking about yourself in the past tense. For me it came when the Indian players started shaking my hands after I got out,” he said.
His eyes were not moist, like the great Donald Bradman in his last innings. “I think I just couldn’t see the ball that Ravichandran Ashwin bowled. Every other ball, I saw pretty well. But that’s the way it goes,” he said.
But as the afternoon wore on, his eyes did turn moist. He stuttered in his farewell speech, when he spoke of the influence of his family, before he was chaired around the ground by his teammates. And then he went off, into the narrow tunnel. To a world unto his own. The narrative of Sanga, the cricketer is over, though not the legacy.
And it’s not a legacy that can be measured in terms of the mementos he has hoarded or the runs he has accumulated—12400 in Tests, the fifth highest ever —or the superlative aggregate he has managed—57-40, the 10th-best ever. Neither can he be measured in terms of the aesthetic appeal of his batting. For he belongs to that rare species of cricket humanist.