Tarish Bhatt
Without Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene, Sri Lanka ODI team won’t be the same again. Their retirement from ODI cricket is the biggest loss for a team. It’s the end of a road for nearly a 15-year-old partnership. It’s also the end of an era after Sri Lanka lost the first quarterfinal match to South Africa on Wednesday. Fortunately, Sangakkara would still be available for Test cricket for some a while, but this match against South Africa was Mahela’s last international outing.
Like we had Australia’s Mathew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist, the West Indies’ Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes and India’s Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, both Sangakkara and Jayawardene were always associated with Sri Lanka with top-most respect. After playing for so many years together what remains the high-point of their partnership is that they are out of the Lankan ODI side not because of their performances, but they opted out on their own to make way for the youngsters.
Next time Sri Lankan ODI team would be decided their selectors would have to really struggle to find the right names who would be replacing these two greats of the game. What is more worrying is that the Sri Lankan team doesn’t have many big stars left in their line-up. After these two legends, only two cricketers come to our mind. One is Lasith Malinga and another is captain Angelo Mathews.
Who is going to take Sri Lanka cricket forward? Time will answer that and both Sangakkara and Jayawardene agree on one point that the players keep coming and going, it’s the cricket that goes on forever. When Sangakkara was asked specifically about his retirement, he gave a very philosophical reply. “Retirement is not about form, it is about time and place and whether it feels right,” he was quoted as saying in the media.
Jayawardene too shares the same sentiment that if he continues to play for Sri Lanka for a long time, he would end up taking the slot of another player. The same player who will get an opportunity today may land up becoming another Jayawardene. The fact that both of them have more or less same philosophies, they never had any glaring misunderstanding between them. They are leaving behind a rich legacy that will help the Sri Lankan in the long run.
No other team can boast of having two such senior players, from the same generation, to have such much of rapport between them. They complimented each other well from the very beginning and even on the day they lost to South Africa, there were smiles on their faces. They are really the true ambassadors of the game!
