May all the days be their days!

“Sometimes, as a batsman, you have days when you know it is going to be your day and this was one of those as I dropped into a rhythm right from the start. Conditions were perfect; the outfield was like glass,”
-Kumar Sangakkara- Serious Winning Business –August 3, 2003.

Even though eight long years have passed after the accolades were made, the Sinhalese Sports Club ground looked unchanged on the the warm, sunny Saturday when Sri Lanka played Australia in their third and final test. When the Lankan cricketing heartthrob made this comment after scoring his first century at the SSC, that came a few months after his maiden ton in Galle, he would have never thought that this would be the venue for his hundredth test appearance.

Perhaps that is what makes test cricket in Sri Lanka so much more special than the two other forms of the game. It certainly lacks the intensity and nail-biting anxiety. Yet, as the players who love playing the game, test matches have their inherent characteristics; for me, it is all about breaking the cords with the outside world and enjoying the Colombo heat and the occasional breeze that makes the Lion flags flutter with pride.

That was the dose of cricket I have been missing for so long: a strange, timeless fascination that sometimes bordered on madness. It seeped into my writing. When the season was on and the weekends were strewn with schedules that often dragged me to a shady pavilion at the SSC, I ate cricket, I breathed cricket and I lived on it.

My madness did not have a method. My family failed to see the logic behind my meditation on eleven men clad in white, running behind a ball under the merciless sun. They were oblivious to the beauty of a cover-drive coming out of Sangakkara’s bat or the magical spin of Muralitharan. My teenage fantasies were all about the home team walking away with the series win. And to this day, it has not changed.

It was a dream-come- true for me to sit again in a familiar pavilion on a mid September afternoon to see the home team having the upper hand in the game. I let pineapples indulge me. I can excuse myself to sip a fizzy drink and I get happy-feet when hearing baila and papare music. My heart swells with an innocent pride to be at a match that marked a milestone of a brilliant cricketer who boasts of Sri Lankan-ness with his every stroke, both in and out of the field.

On my way home, clutching at the tickets that will end up in my treasure box, I kept hoping, ‘May all outfields look like glass and may all the days be theirs!’