Aravinda de Silva - Sri Lanka's greatest batter?

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A young player looks at the car park and sees a legend getting out of the car an hour after the match started. He told them he might be late, of course. He’s driven in his whites, and his sneakers are undone. He strolls onto field at first slip, but then tells the coach he is hungry and someone needs to get him some pastries. He eats one, but puts the other in his pocket for later.

When an edge occurs he moves out the way and looks at the second slip as if it was his. When it’s his time to bat, the opposition would put on their worst bowlers, part-timers, and the once in a year dregs. He would get bored, step past one, ask when the team’s other star was batting, and tell everyone he would be back tomorrow when needed.

Then some days, the opposition would do something to him. Some short balls, or say something that would annoy him, and then he would score 150 or 200 in a flash.

The young player was Kumar Sangakkara, the legend was Aravinda de Silva. That was all from a Sangakkara story about his former teammate from Nondescripts Cricket Club.

“It is an honour to welcome you as the fourth Sri Lankan to be inducted to the ICC Hall of Fame. Though I can't help thinking that if you asked any of the three of us already there - myself, Sanga [Kumar Sangakkara] or Murali [Muttiah Muralitharan] - we would all agree that it should have been you first.” Those were the words Mahela Jayawardene used in his letter to Aravinda de Silva after the latter was inducted into the ICC Hall of Fame.

But Sangakkara averaged 57.4 in Tests, while Aravinda averaged just a little under 43. Mahela scored 11814 runs, Aravinda only 6361. Yet the two modern players talk about Aravinda as if he was better than both of them.

Many, like Mahela, still consider him to be the best batter produced by Sri Lanka.

When Aravinda hit 167 against Australia at the Gabba in 1989, he put on a partnership with his teammate Arjuna Ranatunga. It was tough going for Arjuna, facing a pace attack that featured Geoff Lawson, Merv Hughes, Terry Alderman and Carl Rackemann. When they got back to the dressing room at lunch on Day 3, Arjuna asked to see Aravinda’s bat. He held it up against his own, convinced there was something different about it. It had to be thicker, or wider, or springier—because that’s the only way he could explain how Aravinda was middling everything, while everyone else was struggling. Though that whole act could have been in jest, that was really how people would come to see Aravinda, somebody who could do things no one else could.

From 1984 to 1995, Sri Lanka lost a lot. They turned up, they were nice, they smiled, they showed flashes of brilliance, but no one really took them seriously. Aravinda, in many ways, embodied this. He was polite to a fault, he was brilliant one day, and a walking wicket on another. Of course his talent was recognized, but he just didn’t make the runs to be considered one of the best in the world. Being the best batter, by far, in a weak side, didn’t help, nor did the infrequency in which Sri Lanka played. From 1987 to 1992, the team didn’t play a single international game at home, as a civil war raged on in the island.

By 1991, Aravinda had three centuries in Tests, all away from home. Two came against a bowling attack that featured Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Abdul Qadir in 1985, when Aravinda was just 20.

When Aravinda left the shores of New Zealand in March 1991, many thought it would be the tour that would change everything for him. His 493 runs came in five innings and it included a knock of 267 in the first Test, which he apparently scored hungover and on one hour of sleep.

The story goes that when the Sri Lankan side were in Auckland for two ODIs before the Test series, he was convinced by his sister, who lived there, to go to bed early and get plenty of rest in preparation for the games. It turned out it did nothing for his performances. He came away with a first ball duck and another single digit score. So when the team travelled to Wellington for the first Test and he got the opportunity to go out with some friends after the first day’s play, he decided he was going to ditch the ‘early to bed’ stuff and have some fun. By his own admission, he returned to the hotel with about an hour to go for breakfast. At the end of that day’s play, he had more than 200 runs to his name. In fact, it was the first time he’d scored that many runs in a day at any level. Aravinda’s partying became part of cricketing folklore in Sri Lanka then.

When he got 96 and 123 later in that series, he put the world on notice.

But between 1992 and 1997, he only went on to make three more centuries. He would get starts, look like a million bucks and then he’d get out doing something outrageous. It was almost as if he was bored. He needed some sort of external motivation.

He batted with an almost uncontrollably daring approach, loved fast cars and liked to party and so was given the nickname ‘Mad Max’. It wasn’t really a compliment. He was an anti-hero at times.

What New Zealand 1991 couldn’t do, Kent 1995 seemed to accomplish. Aravinda’s career trajectory completely changed after his stint in Canterbury.

Kent and Western Australia coach Daryl Foster was responsible for bringing Aravinda to the county as a replacement for Carl Hooper. He’d first seen him in that Brisbane Test in 1989. Kent Captain Mark Benson once told The Cricketer that he’d got at least 120 letters from members criticising the decision. Hooper had been one of the most successful batters in the previous season and when Aravinda struggled in the pre-season, things were not looking up.

But then the sun came out and once it did, there was no stopping him. He ended the season as the third most prolific batter of the County Championship that year with 1661 runs at an average of 59.32. These included four centuries and two double centuries, one more than what Hooper had managed in the previous season.

His most memorable innings was probably the 112 he made in the Benson & Hedges final against Lancashire at Lord’s. Kent lost the game, but Aravinda was named Player of the Match for his audacious century—a knock many County fans still talk about. It was really this moment that altered not just Aravinda’s trajectory, but Sri Lanka’s as well.

Many who knew him well, would later say that it was like something just clicked during his time in Kent, something changed and it was a different Aravinda who came back to play for Sri Lanka.

1995 was a transformative year for the Sri Lankan team. Arjuna, Duleep Mendis and later on Dav Whatmore had been steadily building a formidable side, with Aravinda as its nucleus. Andrew Fernando’s piece on Sri Lanka’s unlikely World Cup win in Cricket Monthly notes how each of the players had a distinct role to play, with detailed instructions from Arjuna. Aravinda had none.

Everyone with the team was given strict instructions on what to do with anything related to Aravinda too. Let him be. Let him eat what he wants, train the way he wants, do what he wants. If everyone left him alone, he would help Sri Lanka win the World Cup.

Arjuna once relayed a story which really epitomized the importance the team management placed on keeping Aravinda happy. During the 1995 tour of Australia, the Sri Lanka team had to make some long journeys on the bus. Aravinda would get in, stick a cassette of his favourite English songs in the music player in the bus and go to his seat. The other players would much rather have listened to Sinhalese songs. But they said nothing, this was Aravinda and they had instructions. However, they could be tolerant only for so long. After some deliberation, the team decided they would put together some money and buy Aravinda a Walkman, so that he could listen to his music in private. Remember, this wasn’t a time when players were earning thousands of dollars, but Arjuna and his team knew how important Aravinda would be to their plans.

Under a year after that century for Kent, Aravinda would make another century in a tournament final, but this time he was on the winning side. It wasn’t just some domestic tournament, but the World Cup.

Aravinda’s performance with the bat was incredible. The odds were stacked heavily against Sri Lanka, Australia were the favourites to win. Nobody had hit a hundred while chasing in a World Cup final until Aravinda did. And by doing so, he ensured Sri Lanka became the first country to win a World Cup final while chasing. No team had really done this much this soon after entering major cricket.

Aravinda also took the wickets of Mark Taylor, Ricky Ponting and Ian Healy and two catches. It was a staggering all-round performance, at the biggest of stages, in the most important game of his life.

But it was arguably not even his best performance of the World Cup. No, that was the knock that came in the semi-final against India. A packed Eden Gardens—which they say houses a 100,000 in the stands and another 100,000 just outside the gates—all baying for blood.

Sri Lanka, who’d shown a preference towards chasing were sent into bat. Kaluwitharana and Sanath lasted four deliveries and Aravinda walked in with the score on 1 for 2. What followed was an onslaught. Like he didn’t see the score, or care.

Aravinda cut, drove and pulled with such ferocity that India really had no answers. They tried to tempt him to play away from his body but every drive he played on the up just pinged off his bat, piercing the infield to blaze its way to the boundary. It was the day he really earned that Mad Max moniker—a lone warrior vigilante fighting for the survival of his team, in the only way he knew how, all-out attack.

Aravinda didn’t get a hundred that day, he didn’t even make it to the 15th over of the innings, but by the time he was done he had set the course to Sri Lanka’s run to their first World Cup final. If the knock in the final was steely, calculated and controlled, this was just a raw and uninhibited attack.

Aravinda was already the brightest star in the galaxy that was Sri Lanka Cricket, but he only burned brighter from then on. It seemed like he lived for the crunch situations, the knockouts, when the game was on the line, or if an expensive car was being awarded to the Player of the Tournament.

Until that 1996 World Cup, there were just whispers of his greatness. But what he did from there on made it impossible not to consider him one of the greats of the era.

1997 was by far his best year in Test cricket. Until then, he’d made eight hundreds and 13 fifties at 35.46. He then hit seven hundreds that year alone, to go with two fifties in just 11 Tests. From 1997, to when he retired in 2002, he hit 12 hundreds and nine fifties, basically reversing his conversion rate from the first half of his career. When Sri Lanka went from a ‘minnow’ to a competitive side, it allowed their best player to become a better version of himself.

Aravinda’s last Test innings yielded him a double hundred, but what most people remember is his last international—the 2003 World Cup semi-final against the old foes, Australia.

From the day Simon O’Donnell said it was a waste to give Sri Lanka a Test in Australia because they can’t last five days in 1989, Aravinda had nursed a special corner of vindictiveness for the Aussies. He relished the opportunity to make runs against them, averaging 48 against them in ODIs, almost 15 runs better than his mark against the other teams. That is pretty special, considering it was during the years that Australia were becoming almost invincible.

So when he walked into bat with Sri Lanka on 37/3, chasing 212 in the 2003 semi-final, you just had a feeling that he was going to do something special. He was a little rounder at the waist than he was in 1996, a bit slower on his feet, but he had that same steely look in his eyes. But this time, it wasn’t to be. A mixup with his partner cost him the chance of a fairytale swansong. Ironic too, that the man who many blame for the dismissal, Kumar Sangakkara, would go on to take his mantle as Sri Lanka’s best batter.

Australia didn’t know much about Kumar, but they knew enough about Aravinda to be happy he was gone.

He was a man who needed the motivation of big games, an opposition that annoyed him and a County contract to be his best. But when he found that gear, he was like few players on earth.

When Aravinda made his debut for Sri Lanka in 1984, they were yet to win a Test and had less than 10 ODI wins under their belts. By the time he retired in 2003, Sri Lanka were World Cup winners and a force in Tests as well.

Legends came after him. Yet, they still whisper his name.