The most feared gentleman in cricket
One can't help but feel for the Sri Lankan journalists covering the World Cup. How they plan to describe Kumar Sangakkara's fourth consecutive century is bemusing.
The century against Bangladesh could have been portrayed as the one that revived the Lankans; his blistering approach against England earned him the 'Superman' tag and by the time he delivered against Australia the press box was at a loss for words; 'speechless', as a Sri Lankan journalist put it.
The fourth century? Now that's just cruel. Come on Kumar! You can't just expect journalists to create new adjectives to describe your innings overnight. Don't you have a loose end we could write about? Now that's something that would sell!
But then again, those following Sangakkara closely should have expected him to reach the amazing feat. He does after all portray a machine when in form and on occasions such as these all that the opponents can do is sit back, hope that the perfectionist feels slightly overwhelmed and commits a mistake.
That rarely happens though; just ask the Bangladeshis and they can spend an entire night telling you of all the nightmares that this man has caused.
There's often a debate in Sri Lanka as to who among the two, Mahela Jayawardene and Sangakkara, have influenced Sri Lankan cricket more. Jayawardene is described as the natural athlete who was deemed as the next Sri Lankan great from a very early age.
Sangakkara, on the other hand, has had to work extremely hard to reach where he has today. A mere glance at his net sessions during training depicts the amount of work he puts in. When he came to Dhaka in January last year, he was seen practicing his front-foot defence shots for close to an hour, the day before the start of the Test series against Bangladesh.
He justified his disciplined training approach by scoring more than 400 runs, including a triple century, in the second Test of that series. The hosts had no answer.
The fact that he thought it was necessary to work on something as elementary as his defence prior to a game against one of the weakest bowling line-ups in Test cricket, says a lot about the maestro's mentality.
But that of course was just his account on the field. Off it, it was the left-hander's humility that left everyone awestruck.
After the post-match press conference of the second Test, all the 30-odd journalists in the room rushed towards Sangakkara with a copy of the match's scorecard for autographs; it was chaos, to say the least, and the Sri Lankan media manager, who obviously wasn't used to such a response back home, didn't know what to do.
Sangakkara, on the other hand, calmly collected a pen and signed every paper that was put forth to him. And that wasn't all. The selfie requests were next in line and most of those were humbly accepted by the left-hander as well. It had taken him approximately half-an-hour to come out of the media room and he didn't seem to complain.
After yesterday's game Sri Lanka captain Angelo Mathews revealed that he had in fact begged Sangakkara not to retire from the game after the World Cup. And by no means was Mathews off-limits; for true gentlemen like Sangakkara are hard to find these days.
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