It’s Sangakkara versus Steyn
WAKEY WAKEY: It is time for South Africa’s Dale Steyn to snap out of his slumber and put the funk back into his game
in Napier ONE has reeled off four consecutive World Cup centuries. The other has barely announced his presence, with just nine wickets in six games.
One has astounded even his most ardent supporters with his hunger for runs in what he has said will, at the age of 37, be his swansong to the 50-over format. The other, who at 31 has several good years left, has disappointed those who know him as the finest fast bowler of the age.
Both will be key figures in the World Cup quarterfinal between SA and Sri Lanka in Sydney on Wednesday.
Will Kumar Sangakkara rise to the challenge so magnificently for the fifth consecutive time? Will Dale Steyn snap out of the funk he has been in for the tournament so far?
It’s Sanga versus Steyn, and it will define Wednesday’s showdown more than any other duel in a match between teams who know that winning is survival and that losing will unleash a storm of withering questions.
SA have come to depend on Steyn as the bowler who will get the job done, whatever that job is, and get it done with style and class. Change names and RUN MACHINE: Sri Lanka’s Kumar Sangakkara takes centre stage for his country places, and the same could be said for Sangakkara.
In countries like Sri Lanka and SA, where cricket is not resourced well enough to find all the talent it wants, once every generation or so the game is bequeathed a player who rises above all others.
In years past, those players were Allan Donald and Muttiah Muralitharan, or Sanath Jayasuriya and Jacques Kallis. Now they are Steyn and Sangakkara.
That these modern greats should be thrust together on so important a stage lends context to one-day cricket’s often facile existence. But the story they have told at the tournament is richer than even that.
Steyn has brought himself back to the human scale he seemed to have left behind all those years ago by talking about how the veld fires near his home in Cape Town made him feel; not as a cricketer but as a person.
To hear him in awe of a force of nature that could have destroyed the fabric of his life and also of the firefighters who ensured that did not happen was to be reassured that even the superstars have hopes and fears. So he is not taking wickets. So what?
Sangakkara has risen higher on the human scale than ever before by explaining why, whatever happens, the World Cup will be the last one-day cricket he will play.
“Retirement is not about form,” he wrote in a newspaper column. “It is about time and place and whether it feels right. It is never about whether you can play or not. It feels the right time to retire for various reasons and I am not going to be changing my plans.
“My father, who has helped me throughout my career, used to tell me as a boy that I must ‘never be afraid of change’ and that has been an important lesson for me.”
If and when Sangakkara faces Steyn on Wednesday we will see two of the greatest exponents of bowling and hitting a cricket ball in action. We will also see two champions.