We have become so accustomed to watching cricket from behind the bowler's arm it is easy to forget the separate joy offered by a side on view of the action.
To observe the play from perpendicular to the pitch is not merely to change perspective but to gain insight into the game's gestures. The batsman's footwork in particular is revealed in its full glory. Sachin Tendulkar stands at the crease supremely balanced, poised to play either forward or back. In his prime, his feet slid so easily into position it was as if they weren't fully planted on the ground but were instead levitating ever so slightly.
Sri Lanka's Kumar Sangakkara is another batsman best viewed from the square boundary. Sangakkara never bludgeons his drive - rather, he caresses it. His cricket reflects his character. Sangakkara epitomises the scholar-sportsman. Articulate and insightful off the field (his university law studies were interrupted by his call-up to the national side) his batting is straight from the textbook. There are several YouTube compilations devoted entirely to his off-drive. Last year, he delivered the annual Cowdrey Lecture on the spirit of cricket to an audience of MCC members, demonstrating erudition and good humour.
Sangakkara's cricket is elegant yet never ostentatious. The pleasure of watching him bat comes from his technical soundness. Against both spin and fast bowling, he gets down on bended knee to ease the ball through the covers or behind point. He calls to mind past masters. In his biography of WG Grace, Simon Rae offers this description of Sangakarra's namesake and Grace's contemporary, the great Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji:
Ranji's batting… was based on a perfect eye and impeccable timing, grounded in a sure defence… but with a flamboyant emphasis on attack… There was an extra dimension to his play: footwork… Ranji refused to be chained to the crease… He utterly rejected the notion of a 'good length ball', dancing down the wicket to meet slow bowling on the half-volley.
There is something of Sangakkara in that portrait. To watch him in action is to understand the distinction between a 'shot' and a 'stroke.' He is a paragon of orthodoxy in a nation that has prided itself on its strikingly unorthodox cricket.
The critic TE Hulme once contrasted 'classical' and 'romantic' attitudes in literature, describing the former thus: "Even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man." Sangakkara's batting obeys this principle. There is restraint but it is never obvious; it is not a curtailing of the will, a suppression of instinct. Nor is it merely that he knows his limitations. If Sangakkara's stroke play delights the eye, it is incidental to his aims. He bats with patience, maturity and a regard for safety and his dismissals are rarely the result of recklessness.
While Sangakkara's record marks him as a modern great (nearly 10,000 Test runs at an average of over 55) he has scored only one hundred in nine Tests against Australia, a towering 192 at Bellerive Oval five years ago. He will be keen to back it up with more big scores in the coming weeks. Yet he has already proved himself against antipodean opposition in the game's shorter form. In the ICC Super Series in 2005, Sangakkara top scored for the World XI in two of its One-Day games against Australia. In the second of these, his off-side play appeared effortless and unstoppable until Ricky Ponting stationed a semi-circle of four fielders from point to extra cover. It was a shrewd move and Sangakkara was dismissed a short-time later. At the time though it seemed underhanded and even a little cruel, as if - to adjust Arthur Mailey's metaphor - a dove had just had its wings clipped.
Batting aside, Australian cricket lovers are preparing for another shift in focus this summer as South Africa makes way for Sangakkara's Sri Lanka. There is an air of anti-climax lingering. Most fans, it's fair to say, would probably have gone without the upcoming three Tests if it meant another two against the Proteas. The general feeling is that the fight for Test cricket's number one ranking deserved five matches.
But it would be wrong to dismiss the series against Sri Lanka as a mere afterthought. Sri Lanka's cricketers arrived in Australia not as a belated and misplaced support act but as a team that boasts a formidable top order and may yet surprise its opponents. South Africa's most recent defeat in a Test match was at the hands of Sri Lanka. While Sri Lanka has never won a Test match down under, Australian tours there have produced compelling cricket. In the First Test of the 1992 series, Australia won by a mere 16 runs after Sri Lanka scored 547 in the first innings. Set 181 for victory, Sri Lanka collapsed, losing eight wickets for 37 runs. The last three scalps were claimed by Shane Warne playing in his first overseas Test. The remaining matches were drawn.
In 1999, that result was reversed, with Sri Lanka winning the series 1-0. It was Australia's last defeat before a 16-game winning streak. In 2004, Sri Lanka lost all three Tests after leading on the first innings. The series is best remembered as a bowl-off between the men who now lend their names to the trophy contested by their countries - Shane Warne, who took 26 wickets, and Muttiah Muralitharan, who took 28. Their contrasting styles - Warne the sublimely orthodox, Muralitharan the devastatingly original - symbolised not only the distinct cricket cultures of their respective nations but a conflict at the heart of Sri Lankan cricket itself.
In a cricketing sense, 'orthodox' is to be correct and classical but potentially bland and predictable. 'Unorthodox' can mean innovative, perhaps even unprecedented, but also suggests the disingenuous and barely legal. The uncertainties of both terms are all too familiar to followers of Sri Lankan cricket. While Sri Lanka has had many successful players in the traditional mould, Sangakkara not least among them, no other nation has produced as many unconventional Test players in recent years. Aside from Muralitharan, there are the mystery spinners Ajantha Mendis and Rangana Herath and fast bowler Lasith Malinga, who releases the ball with a whippy, round-arm sling.
In his Cowdrey Lecture, Sangakkara attributed this preference for idiosyncrasy to his country's coaching system, which "actively searches out unorthodox talent," and its unique path from cricket's periphery to its centre stage, culminating in the 1996 World Cup triumph. "Even after gaining Test status in 1981," he observed, "Sri Lanka's cricket suffered from an identity crisis and there was far too little 'Sri Lankan' in the way we played… We played cricket by the book, copying the orthodox and conservative styles of the traditional cricketing powerhouses." One detects here that fundamentally postcolonial paranoia - the fear of mimicry, of imitating the colonial 'masters'. It was only under the uncompromising captaincy of Arjuna Ranatunga, Sangakkara claims, that a distinctly Sri Lankan approach to cricket was allowed to flourish. Tellingly, Sangakkara uses the word 'orthodox' in a pejorative sense:
We are fortunate that guys like Lasith [Malinga], Sanath [Jayasuriya], Murali and [Ajantha] Mendis escaped formalised textbook coaching. Had they been exposed to orthodox coaching then there is a good chance that their skills would have been blunted. In all probability, they would have been coached into ineffectiveness.
The current Sri Lankan touring party lacks the unorthodox flair of some of its predecessors. The Test series will be Sri Lanka's first in Australia since the retirement of Muralitharan. Mendis has not been selected and Malinga now restricts himself to the game's shorter forms. But their absence need not be cause for concern. As Kumar Sangakkara continually demonstrates when he bats, convention can also be a wonderful thing.
Tags: cricket, sri-lanka First posted December 10, 2012 20:47:29