Sanath the joy of millions

Cricket: Prasanna Withanage's award winning film 'ira mediyama' had a scene in which a taxi driver was paying lot of attention to the cricket commentary at a time the country was plagued by war.

Bombs were being dropped in Jaffna, Muslims were being driven away from the Peninsula by the LTTE and carpet-bombing destroyed a vegetable garden while an old scraggy woman, coming out of her hut, which was hit by a bomb, cursing the Sinhalese.

Colombo is threatened by suicide bombings, the very existence had become perilous and the country was torn apart by the ongoing war, but, three wheeler drivers, bus commuters and ordinary men were more interested in whether Sanath would get his century. This was immediately after we won the World Cup

We are a nation in search of a hero. We try to find some solace, in order to uplift their low decumbent spirits, in sports. In the 1950s, under the trees of the SSC, sarong-clad exuberant small time businessmen and others, who aped the west, clad in baggy trousers, cheered two clubs.

The sarong Johnnies supported the S.S.C and the trousered Wallahas, the N.C.C. They congregated to witness their heroes of the era, the Sathasivams, De Sarams and Goonesekaras, smashing the cricket ball around the park.

At the oval, they watched C. I. Goonesekara smashing Lindsey Kline over the stand for a number of sixes. This solitary exhibition of batting power by the maestro, C. Ivers Gunasekera, is said to have ended the career of Australian spin bowler Lindsay Kline. Crowds thronged to the Oval when the all conquering West Indies played an exhibition match.

As there were not enough to players to make the full West Indies team, local cricketers were recruited. As there was a massive crowd, tiers were built near the oval Scoreboard. The tiers swayed due to the sheer weight of the crowd. A spectacle was unfolding before their very eyes. Wesley Hall was running in from the boundary line, he delivered a ball, which could not be seen with the naked eye.

The next thing the crowd observed was the stumps had been shattered and lay flat on the ground. The batsman, a school boy prodigy of that time, Sarath Silva walked dejectedly back to the pavilion.

When the Windies were batting, Rohan Kanahai was scoring at a furious pace. The crowd loved it. From the tiers they shouted themselves hoarse, cheering the magnificent batting prowess of Rohan Kanhai. The next ball from D. H. de Silva sailed over the tiers. The crowd went berserk. The exhibition of batting savagery and the lightning bowling was super human.

It was beyond belief. Can a human being bowl with such ferocious speed? Can a human being hit the cricket ball with such authority? The fables, fairy tales and 'dasamahayodayas' came to one's mind.

When will, or will we, ever produce heroes like these West Indian giants? Our climate, our food, our malnourished emaciated bodies, cannot stand up to the rigors of a five-day Test Cricket, the Colombo elite opined.

We were doomed without any heroes in the making. Then came a young brat from Matara, who had played beach cricket and studied in a Christian School. He was taken into the team as a spin bowler and lower order batsman.

One day, in a Test match, I saw him bat and I saw the ball racing to the boundary almost scorching the sward and making a slight mark on the green. The power of the blade, like that of a Jedi warrior, pierced the heart of the spectators and drew the first blood of vengeance, from the insidious rotten conspiracy, to keep the villagers from playing the game of the colonial masters at the highest level. But, the force was with the downtrodden people, the scum of the earth.

Sanath was their Jedi warrior striking against the evil empire built around the Colombo elitist schools and clubs. The masses found that the empire could not deliver.

When the imperial masters played the first Test against us, we were beaten like a second grade school boy team. In 1989, the team led by Mike Gatting payed a courtesy call, as they are usually obliged to, to keep the interest of the Imperial Cricket Conference in the states that had gained Test status.

We were admitted to this exclusive club, due to the yeoman service rendered to Sri Lanka Cricket, by Minister Gamini Dissanayake and due to the indefatigable spirit of the head of the Maharajah group, Raja Mahendran and few others.

The MCC obliged and played an ODI at Moratuwa. There came from nowhere, a young cricketer, who bowled left arm orthodox spin. He tangled and mesmerized King Gatting's knights of the round table.

The knights thought that instead of a fire breathing dragon, there would be a harmless chameleon to counter with, to take home the golden apples of victory. Instead, they found to their utter surprise, a unique dragon, who was smiling all the time but mesmerizing the Poms with a web that spun around them and tantalized them into submission.

He was called 'Sanaboy'. Sanath took Six Wickets and in the Second ODI, played at Moratuwa, against the same team, Sanath came late in the batting order scored 34 and took two wickets.

What the country needed was a folk hero. A 'Pied Piper', who would lead it to a surrealistic world of fantasy. As there were no other field that could even, in their remotest imagination, of the rustics, produce or was able to produce a hero in relation to the game that the empire introduced to the natives.

Cricket was the game of the elitist and enjoyed by the hoi-polloi. The cheering squad came from them. To them, Sanath was one of them, a rustic villager, from Matara, who had never seen the inside of a Colombo school or club. Day by day, Sanath was growing in stature. The people felt that they too were growing with him. Out went the woes associated with the daily chores, the war, the cost of prohibitive existence. There was a man, who delivered when you most wanted him to.

The sinewy forearms, akin to the mythical blacksmith in the village, eyes that were like that of a hawk, speed of lightning, the hand-eye co-ordination that surpassed the best in the business, Sanath blossomed.

In Pakistan in the 1996 World Cup, when he smashed Defraitas to all corners of the park and one ball sailed and landed in the huge dish antenna, Boycott, who had not seen Sanath before, said: "My Gosh the ball continues to disappear and this is supposed to be one of the fiercest pace attacks in the world, but this man had treated the English attack with utter disdain." Defraitas' career ended and the next casualty was Manoj Prabahkar, who was smashed by Jayasuriya in the Ferosh Kotala stadium at New Delhi.

Jayasuriya once held the world record for the fastest half century, fastest century, till a Pathan warior named Shahid Afridi broke it. He holds the present record for the fastest fifty in a 'Twenty20' game and is the player who had hit the most number of sixes in an ODI.

He is the fourth batsman to reach the milestone of scoring more than 10,000 runs. The village folk hero became the role model, which changed the complexion of the game. Thus, amongst us, from this puny island, a man who had changed the structure and the pattern of One Day Cricket emerged.

The coastal fishing village of Matara became known and as famous as Lahore, Calcutta or Trent Bridge, amongst the Cricketing world. Matara Mauler, Marauder, were the names coined by commentators, who were stunned by Sanath's blitzkrieg.

When he scored the fastest century in Singapore, Ian Chappel said, 'When Sanath was batting the crowd came out of the bars with their beers, as when Sir Donald Bradman was batting how the crowds thronged the venues. It was entertainment of the highest order. It was not a dream.

It was not magical creation with the aid of computers, where the Jedi was fighting the dark forces. The players were real, the ball was real and Sanath was human. The red cherry disappeared and fell into the Supreme Court compound like a shooting star or meteorite. The power with which he bludgeoned the cricket ball in Singapore, at the Singapore Cricket Club will be remembered forever.

I do not think that I can recall any cricketer who played in One Day Internationals winning matches for his country all by himself. He is a one-man destructive machine which steam rolls the opposition into submission.

One can count on one's fingers the number of times the team has won when Sanath failed either with the bat or the ball. On the other hand, one of the greatest modern day cricketers, Sachin Tendulkar is quite the opposite. Whenever he cracks a hundred, India very often loses the match.

Soon the world copied the Pinch hitting exploits of Sanath and Kalu. The net was thrown in search of pinch hitters. All countries found solace in someone who could at least emulate the feats of Mark Greatbatch of New Zealand.

Greatbatch retired and Chris Cairns took over from him. But he too retired and when he played he failed more often than succeed. Bob Woolmer, as the coach of the South African team, said the first name he would write on a piece of paper before he selects the ODI team was that of the Lance Klusner the 'Zulu' from the province of Natal in South Africa.

The crowds thronged to see him bat. As pinch hitter, Lance Klusner could not emulated his own batting prowess for any length of time and failed after the World Cup consistently, and is now out of the South African ODI team. Nicky Boje was tried as a replacement and thrived as a pinch hitter for few matches but has retired from Cricket.

Pakistan breathed a sigh of relief when they finally found the Pathan warrior Shahid Afridi, who could hit the ball to reach the moon, and out of the stand on to the streets. He is known as 'King of Sixes'. But he is consistently in and out of the team and the other teams found out his weaknesses. As time went by, he never made any impact as a formidable opponent.

The West Indies tried to emulate the pinch hitting of Sanath and Kalu. Several batsmen were tried until they found Chris Gayle. How long Chris Gayle would last is any one's guess. England tried Nick Knight, Kabir Ali and even Mathew Hoggard, all of them failed. The great hope of English cricket, Andrew Flintoff, was promoted to captain the English and his form plummeted within a very short span.

India, for several years, tried many cricketers as pinch hitters like Heman Badani, They were of the view that captain Sourav Ganguly is best candidate for the position. He is now not even in the ODI team. Irfan Pathan was promoted as a pinch hitter.

His bowling and batting suffered and he was sent back to India to play domestic cricket. Mahendra Singh Dhoni has lost some of his batting charisma. Only the Australians found the perfect clone for Sanath Jayasuriya in Adam Gilchrist. The Australians are the world champions and the contribution of Gilchrist is unfathomable.

The ultimate accolade was paid to Sanath by the greatest batsman of the modern era Sachin Tendulkar: "I have not seen Don Bradman bat, but I have seen Sanath Jayasuriya. I have not seen a better batsman in my cricketing career, as a player for India and much before that, than Jayasuriya.

He is exceptional...has the skill to play shots on both sides of the wicket. He plays out of the book shots and it becomes difficult to set a field for him. Sometimes he has the luck, but a batsman of his skill, ability and capacity and option to play tremendous shots all round the wicket does not need luck. He was simply brilliant. Indeed, I have not seen any one superior to Jayasuriya."

Sanath is a senior citizen in the cricketing world. He is considered old and many think he has lost his touch due to the weak eye and hand co-ordination. He was dropped and made to retire.

It was an unceremonious send off. He came back and was taken back to the One Day International squad. His brutal attack on the English bowlers, who had won the Ashes, found the English writers, who rarely used expletives to describe an innings, had lost their composure and without praising Sanath they degraded the English bowling attack.

His mannerisms, gardening around the stumps, as if to bury all the demons in the pitch, and before every ball is bowled, tapping a few times then touching the pads and the pockets, as if a clever pick pocket has picked his pocket, looking down like a shy groom avoiding eye contact with the bowlers, who comes at him at full throttle, as his is the most important wicket in the whole wide world.

If Sanath falls cheaply the averages show that Sri Lanka never recovers from the downfall of this one man batting machine. The bowler has been told, at the team meetings, that if he stays and scores runs, Sri Lanka inevitably wins.

The bowler delivers a lethal delivery just outside the off stump and then bat come down and raise in a arc and strikes the ball with a higher bat speed and the ball kisses the sweet spot and sings while it rises from the ground in absolute ecstasy and sails over the fielders like a devoted lover and over the ropes and into the cheering spectator stand. The rocket launched from the multi barrel guns, gather speed and momentum as it leaves the canon, the ball that hits Sanath's bat gathers speed instantaneously even defying the laws of dynamics.

Harsha Bohgle once said the TV cameraman had told him the most difficult job at hand for them was to capture the speeding ball off Sanath's bat. The crowd screams with sheer joy and excitement. The TV crews move their cameras with such speed, but still, only one or two catch the ball as it takes only mille seconds to disappear.

The crowds thronged to see him bat as pinch hitter. Momentous joy engulfs the spectators and a chilling numbing effect enters the bowler, who no longer could concentrate on his line or length. The awesome fear that the next ball delivered by him would sail over the head and the waving hands of the third man, into the pavilion, becomes not a probability but distinct possibility.

The fear enters the bowler's body with a chilling effect. The batter from the Deep South, who changed the complexion of the game and brought in the notion of pinch hitter, has made many Sri Lankans cry in sheer joy.

The miserable, dreary life of the poor, the uninitiated vagabonds and the middle classes, who do not have a fair, square meal, would spend hours glued to the TV watching him bat and is unwilling even to move a finger in the mystical superstitious belief, that such a move would remove from their midst the Matara Maruder, who had given them pleasure of such a magnitude that life seemed to be not worth living, if they cannot see another spectacle of Sanath Jayasuriya with the cricket bat.

Sri Lankans believe in miracles. Those who believe in miracles are the most unfortunate, as they have lost any hope in the natural laws. The hope and expectations of the millions is that the war will be over. Peace will return.

The economy will surge, Poor will have a square meal every day of their pitiful existence, and Sanath will get into a time machine and change the physical laws of time warp, will not age and will entertain them for as long as they watch cricket. Of all the wishes, the Genii seemed to have granted them only the last.

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