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Will Sanath Jayasuriya’s sublime piracy never end? He’s 40 in a few weeks time and yet here he is, playing in the World Twenty20, hitting 81 off 47 balls against the West Indies.
It’s early days for international Twenty20, but only five players have scored more runs than Jayasuriya’s 424. Of those, only two average more than his 35.33 (Misbah-ul-Haq 51.44 and Graeme Smith 36.25). Of those same five, none can match his strike rate of 154.18 runs per hundred balls.
But to dwell on statistics is to insult the true genius of Sanath Jayasuriya, which is of course the joyous ‘ha haaa’ scythe over the offside infield.
If Jayasuriya were English, they’d have discarded him after he made a duck against South Africa in a Test match in 2002. They’d have said that his eyes had gone and would have replaced him with some nervous posh kid with ‘bags of promise’.
Who needs promise when you’ve got the ‘ha haaa’ scythe?
