Mahela Jayawardene: The silent guardian of the Lankan lions!

He went down on his left knee and tried to paddle-sweep the ball over the short fine leg fielder. He misjudged the length, mistimed it and only managed to toe-end it towards mid wicket. He took off for a single and reached the non-striker’s end with the fielder missing the stumps by inches. Had that throw hit, he would have been denied a milestone and would have been stranded on 10,999. After completing the single, he raised his bat and the Sri Lankan contingent in the stadium acknowledged his feat with mild applause – that’s Mahela Jayawardene for you, always there but hardly noticed.

With 10,000 Test runs, 11,000 ODI runs, a highest of 374 in Test cricket and hundreds in all three formats of the game, Jayawardene sits comfortably among the finest batsmen of his generation but he is not considered as a modern day “great”. He has never received the deserved acclaim nor has he created the hype that most of his contemporaries have. His achievements have gone mostly unnoticed and have been celebrated with much lesser fanfare than they were for Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara, Ricky Ponting, Rahul Dravid, Jacques Kallis or even his compatriot Kumara Sangakkara.

His achievement may not have received the deserving accolades but there are not many sights in cricket as visually pleasing as watching Jayawardene in action. His movement at the crease oozes an abundance of class and his simple philosophy of playing late and playing straight is head and shoulders above most batsmen who have graced the gentlemen’s game. If the drives through cover and the whipping flicks past mid-wicket are hallmarks of a master craftsman, the cut behind the wicket, played at the last possible moment when the ball is well past the bat, personifies languid grace.

Sri Lanka has always been blessed with batsmen of the highest class, right from the days of Mahadevan Sathasivam, Duleep Mendis, Ranjan Madugalle and Roy Dias, down to the absolute genius of Aravinda de Silva and Sanath Jayasuriya. However, the Sri Lankan willow power stamped its world-wide authority with the entry of two extraordinary talented gentlemen in the back end of the 90s. Mahela Jayawardene, along with his partner-in-crime Kumara Sangakkara, rewrote the batting history of the island nation. If the flamboyant southpaw added solidity and consistency to the batting line-up, the diminutive right-hander wrapped it with an envelope of class.

Labeled as the “next Aravinda de Silva”, Jayawardene made his Test debut in 1997. With an average of over 45 in his first 25 Tests, he had an impressive start to his Test career. However, it was only in 2001 that he added an extra gear to his batting, and the period from 2003-2007 saw him announce himself on the international scene with 12 centuries. In July 2006, he set the record for the highest score by a Sri Lankan batsman when he piled up a mammoth 374 against the South Africans.

Technically, Jayawardene has been blessed with a strong defence with generous dollops of style and elegance dovetailed with smooth stroke-making ability. In an era where most batsmen are attuned to bludgeoning the cricket ball a la a Tarantino-movie, Jayawardene’s batting is right out of the Nolan cult – it blossoms with time and keeps growing on the viewer as it goes on. His batting is easy on the eye and his innings flow as as a masterly edited montage devoid of jump cuts and jarring.

Even in the shorter formats, there’s hardly any brutality in his batting. He finds gaps in the most meticulously set fields with his crafty wrist work and his uncanny placement, and every boundary scored bears a statement in class. He steps out to Dale Steyn, sweeps James Pattinson and deposits a Zaheer Khan in-swinging yorker into the stands over long-off with extreme ease to demonstrate how orthodox and classical batting can reap rich harvests even in the crudest form of the game.

However, the greatness of Mahela Jayawardene isn’t restricted to his wristy flicks and nimble footwork. He has been a true leader for a country where cricket has been suffering and is literally on the verge of extinction in the hands of politicians and has struggled to produce a stoic leader since the departure of Arjuna Ranatunga. The Sri Lankan cricket board has been too busy playing dirty politics and hence, has failed to plan for the future. They haven’t been able to identify and groom talent, so whenever the cricket team has shown signs of crumbling, the arm-band is tossed back to the ever-trusted Jayawardene.

Under his astute, vivacious and creative captaincy, Sri Lanka has not only conquered uncharted territories, but also survived through their most horrifying moment off the field. In 2009 at Lahore, the Sri Lankan team bus was attacked and the players were stranded among a flurry of bullets. Six Pakistani policemen were killed and seven Sri Lankan cricketers, including both Jayawardene and Sangakkara, suffered injuries from the flying shrapnel. Though the team survived the incident, it didn’t escape unscathed. The mental scars were deeper than the ones seen on the body but Jayawardene saw his team through it with an eerie calm on the face because he had seen and lived it before.

“I have two, three school friends who caught a couple of bombs. I have a friend who still has shrapnel inside his body. He has to carry a certificate whenever he travels, going through machines and all that” - Mahela Jayawardene

Jayawardene played his cricket through the atrocities of a war-stricken country and the death of his teenage brother. However, it couldn’t deter him from his dreams as he found solace in the game, camouflaging the rough edges of his life behind his silken stroke-play.

Yet, he has his fair share of critics who label him as a flat-track bully and undermine his achievements as a cricketer. True, his figures outside the sub-continent don’t do justice to his potential and are astonishing low in more challenging conditions. A true underachiever, Jayawardene has always struggled to live up to the talent he possessed and perhaps that’s why he has slipped under the “greatness” radar despite a Test average nearing 50 and an enviable record across all formats.

But he is one of those cricketers who go beyond the realm of stats and numbers. He will be remembered for his elegance in the middle and as someone who remained calm, unruffled and refused to throw in the towel against the monumental odds, waging on and off-field battles for Sri Lankan cricket. The upcoming Lankan kids might choose Sangakkara and Jayasuriya as their batting heroes and identify Muralitharan as their bowling idol, but if any of them aspire to become a cricketer, there’s only one man who makes the cut.

MJ – The one who guarded Sri Lankan cricket silently, ignited flickers of happiness and brought smiles on the face of a troubled nation!