Mahela Jayawardene: The silent guardian of the Lankan lions!

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!