Kumar Sangakkara is a great credit to the sport, a player every cricket-playing country would be proud to own. As with most batting southpaws, he is as elegant as they come, but able to curb his natural game according to the demands of the situation.
He has a fine cricketing brain, and it was obvious that one day he would lead Sri Lanka, which he did with some élan before giving it all up just when he appeared to be destined to get into the pantheon of greats.
This is a piece to unlearn why, and it has relevance to Pakistan in more ways than one. It also transcends sport, if only because sport in the Saarc arc somehow always gets mixed up with politics!
Like legions of others, I have been a great fan of Sanga — as the former captain is nicknamed — the cricketer. But it is the intellectual mien as reflected by a great understanding of the sport beyond the park and his soft demeanor that worth writing about.
Even though he was the captain of Sri Lanka until the finals of the World Cup in April, you could easily mistake him for a roving global ambassador of the sport in the way he conducted himself.
Maybe the serendipity is down to hard yards in the strife-torn island, but which only recently overcame three decades of civil war. Last week, he became the youngest speaker at the prestigious annual MCC’s Spirit of Cricket lecture at Lord’s — an honour Colombo should have been proud to own but which myopia almost did not allow.
Sanga’s speech has been dubbed as the greatest in the history of the game by many pundits.
To its eternal shame, the political doghouse of the kind we see in Pakistan that has allowed handpicked cronies like Ijaz Butt to destroy both the sport and its practitioners, Sri Lanka, too, is — to borrow Bush-speak — “blindsided” by reason.
The Sri Lankan government has called an inquiry, which will seek an explanation from Sanga as to why he spoke his mind about the way cricket affairs in his country are run when he was contracted to stay silent.
Such a visional-impaired retort has no legs to stand on if only for the fact that the Sri Lankan star had sought — and been permitted — to give the lecture. Perhaps, fearing that their corrupt role could find a mention in Sanga’s address, the permission was withheld for two months before being granted at the proverbial last minute. Not doing so would have invited Sri Lanka Cricket to open ridicule.
But truth and dare Sanga did, not just as a small matter of free speech but also as a proud son of the soil — beyond the distinctive landmarks that tell us of a player, who has, in 423 internationals spanning 11 years, scored more than 18,000 runs.
In his lecture, Sanga described in great detail about the pain and pleasures of being a Sri Lankan cricketer and then captain, of lives lost in a draining civil warfare in which his family provided personal protection to persecuted Tamils at great risk and the Machiavellian nature of successive administrations propped up by thoroughly corrupt political regimes.
He felt the slide began after the epoch-making 1996 World Cup triumph in Pakistan.
“Players from within the team itself became involved in power games within the board. Officials elected to power in this way in turn manipulated player loyalty to achieve their own ends. At times board politics would spill over into the team causing rift, ill feeling and distrust,” he said.
“Accountability and transparency in administration and credibility of conduct were lost in a mad power struggle. Presidents and elected executive committees would come and go; government-picked interim committees would be appointed and dissolved,” he noted.
“It was and still is confusing. Accusations of vote buying and rigging, player interference due to lobbying from each side and even violence at the AGMs, including the brandishing of weapons and ugly fist fights, have characterized cricket board elections for as long as I can remember,” he said.
Sanga feels his fellow players and those who will follow them had a responsibility to the sport beyond performing well.
“Cricket played a crucial role during the dark days of civil war, a period of enormous suffering for all communities, but the conduct and performance of the team will have even greater importance as we enter a crucial period of reconciliation and recovery, an exciting period where all Sri Lankans aspire to peace and unity,” he said.
“The Spirit of Cricket can and should remain a guiding force for good within society, providing entertainment and fun, but also a shining example to how we all should approach our lives.”
Minus the likes of the erudite Sanga, this story is similar to our own political sport.
The writer is a newspaper editor based in Islamabad and can be reached at [email protected]
