Hobart heroics, Durban dominance and a never-ending partnership

After India decided to pull out of the second edition of the Asian Test Championship, Pakistan and Sri Lanka duly beat Bangladesh in their respective league games. Foregoing what had become a meaningless round-robin meeting with each other, they moved directly to the final in Lahore. Sanath Jayasuriya's side had gone on a streak of eight successive wins, but they knew Pakistan in Pakistan presented a difficult challenge - even if they had won four of their last seven Tests in the country.

In the event, Sri Lanka needn't have worried too much, Pakistan folded for 234 after being sent in. Waqar Younis dismissed Marvan Atapattu off the first ball of the Sri Lankan innings, and that brought the 24-year-old Kumar Sangakkara to the crease. He proceeded to bat for close to five-and-a-half hours, or, as Wisden put it, "for three hours longer than his opponents' entire innings". His runs, during that time, came at a strike rate of over 70 - quicker than Jayasuriya's runs during their partnership of 203 for the second wicket - against an attack that included Waqar, Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Sami, who ended the Sri Lankan innings with a hat-trick.

By then, though, the damage had been done. Sangakkara's 230 had given Sri Lanka a 294-run lead, and even an improved Pakistan performance in their second innings couldn't prevent a thumping win for the visitors, with Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene administering the final touches.

Sangakkara had played purely as a batsman in 13 of his first 60 Tests, but ahead of the SSC Test against South Africa in July 2006, the selectors relieved him of wicketkeeping duties permanently in the longer format. He wasn't too pleased at the time, but he later admitted that this was a career-changing move. In 85 Tests as a specialist batsman, he averages over 67, as opposed to 40.48 in 48 Tests as keeper.

The selectors' vision was vindicated instantly. Dilhara Fernando and Muttiah Muralitharan ran through South Africa on the first day, bowling them out for 169, before a young, fiery and slightly raw Dale Steyn removed both Sri Lanka openers. It was 14 for 2 when Mahela Jayawardene joined Sangakkara in the final session of the first day.

It was 638 for 3 when Sangakkara was caught behind off Andrew Hall, in the middle session of day three. For 157 overs in between, Sangakkara and Jayawardene simply batted, and batted, and batted some more. Their partnership of 624 was the biggest, for any wicket, in all of Test and first-class cricket.

There was a bit of luck early on for Sangakkara - on 7, Jacques Rudolph dropped him off Steyn at gully; on 8, Steyn bowled him off the inside edge, off a no-ball. Given that double-life in the same over, Sangakkara capitalised in a manner that would become increasingly familiar to viewers worldwide.

"They consolidated to start with, playing themselves in earnestly before effortlessly expanding the strokeplay," Wisden said. "Their unblinking concentration allowed for near-perfect shot-selection, and the execution was of the highest quality, the ball rarely eluding the sweetest middle of their bats. The batting was clinical - but also relaxed and elegant."

Jayawardene flowed elegantly on after Sangakkara's departure, his 374 the highest score by a right-handed batsman in Tests. Seven sessions remained when he declared, right after he was bowled by Andre Nel, and though South Africa battled hard, they were never going to survive that long against Muralitharan, who wheeled his way through 64 overs for his second-innings six-for.

New Zealand had won the first Test in Christchurch, a low-scoring and ill-tempered affair. Muralitharan had been run out when he had left his crease to congratulate Sangakkara for reaching a brilliant, backs-to-the-wall hundred.

Sri Lanka were incensed, but Stephen Fleming, the New Zealand captain, said he had no qualms over the dismissal. Leading up to the second Test in Wellington, Fleming brought it up again. "It's a mistake by them and they covered it up by taking the moral high ground," he said. "We won a good Test match and it's been diluted by that situation."

Maybe his words fired up Sangakkara a little bit extra. Maybe he was just in incredible form. In the first innings at the Basin Reserve, he struck an unbeaten 192-ball 156, which remains the quickest of all his hundreds. It was also an almost single-handed effort: he scored over 58% of his team's total of 268, with Chamara Silva (61) and Prasanna Jayawardene (25) the only other batsmen to get into double figures.

Every subsequent event in the Test magnified the value of Sangakkara's innings. Inspired spells from Lasith Malinga and Muralitharan bowled New Zealand out for 130, and an unbeaten 152 from Silva in the second innings helped Sri Lanka set what proved an insurmountable target of 504. Muralitharan spun New Zealand out once again, and Sri Lanka had won a Test in the country for only the second time.

Sri Lanka were eight down, and needed a further 143 runs to reach an outlandish target of 507, but it still seemed like a genuine 'what if' moment. Sangakkara was early into a hook against Stuart Clark, and the ball hit his shoulder, glanced off his helmet, and popped to second slip. All of Australia appealed. Rudi Koertzen raised his left forefinger, slowly and erroneously. Later, he would apologise for his decision.

By all numerical measures, Sri Lanka would have lost anyway. But Sangakkara was batting on a different sort of plane that day. Anything seemed possible. He had batted in his normal, orthodox fashion through the first half of his innings, in century partnerships with Marvan Atapattu and Sanath Jayasuriya, as Sri Lanka appeared to make a genuine tilt at an unimaginably steep chase. But a collapse thereafter, which saw Sri Lanka lose five wickets for 25 runs, forced Sangakkara to reach outside his usual box of tools.

Sangakkara began backing away from his stumps against the seamers - Brett Lee, Mitchell Johnson and Clark - to carve them through and over the off side. Malinga blocked at one end, and the boundaries flowed at the other, as Sangakkara moved from 134 to 192 in 54 balls.

"You have good days and bad days, and then some days when you are able to do things that you normally can't," Sangakkara later said. "That was a special day for me. Everything clicked and worked. It was very easy for me to hit those shots because I was in the zone - in that space where everything goes right."

With a new stadium coming up in nearby Pallekele, this would be the final time the Asgiriya Stadium - Sangakkara's school ground - hosted a Test match. The Old Trinitian made the occasion special, twice over. On a pitch that offered just a bit of help on the first morning, Sri Lanka were quickly in trouble against Matthew Hoggard's seam movement, slipping to 42 for 5 in no time. Sangakkara and Prasanna steadied their innings with a 106-run sixth-wicket stand, before Monty Panesar ran through the lower order. Sangakkara's 92 comprised nearly 49 per cent of Sri Lanka's total of 188.

England took a not insubstantial lead of 93, only for Jayasuriya to wipe it out in a hurry with a breezy 78 in his final Test innings. Walking in at 113 for 1, Sangakkara pressed home Sri Lanka's new-found advantage with a ruthlessness that was quickly becoming his trademark: by the time he was done, he had made a 150-plus score in each of his last four Test matches. Set 350 to win, England came to within 20 minutes of saving the match, but Muralitharan and Chaminda Vaas had the final say.

ESPNcricinfo's Andrew Miller summed it up perfectly, suggesting there were two Test matches taking place, one "a struggle for batsmen on both sides, with the wicket providing assistance for the seamers and bite for Muttiah Muralitharan", and the other "a batting soliloquy from Kumar Sangakkara".

Sri Lanka had won the first Test by an innings, and lost the second by 170 runs. Going into the decider, Sangakkara hadn't really been among the runs - his three innings so far had fetched him 12, 68 and 1. There was something in the P Sara Oval pitch for both seamers and spinners, and Dhammika Prasad duly did his bit, alongside Ajantha Mendis and Muralitharan - the scourge of India's batting line-up right through the series - to bowl the visitors out for 249 on the first day.

But it wasn't the worst total on a bowling-friendly pitch, and when Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma reduced Sri Lanka to 42 for 2 on the second morning, India scented an opening. Sangakkara shut it in their faces with an innings that he called his best, "in the context of a series". He batted with what he called "magnified focus", shifting the momentum Sri Lanka's way even while scoring only 27 runs in the middle session of day two.

"The way the game was going it was a case of testing the bowlers' patience. India could not just sit back. Harbhajan Singh couldn't have gone on bowling across me, because he needed to get wickets. He couldn't have kept tempting me that way," Sangakkara wrote in ESPNcricinfo. "India didn't have much more than 200 on the board, and the closer we got the harder they tried. And that's when the loose deliveries came. They started to err in line and length, and I had the patience to wait until then."

Sangakkara's rock-solid presence at one end ensured continuity, and partnerships kept forming even though no one else made fifty in the Sri Lankan first innings. Three Indian batsmen made fifties in the match, but none of them carried on for more than half as long as Sangakkara did. That proved the difference between the sides as Sri Lanka ran away to an eight-wicket win.

Ten of Sangakkara's hundreds have come against Pakistan, and six of them in matches involving Saeed Ajmal. In an era when most batsmen struggled to comprehend Ajmal's variations, Sangakkara faced 1224 balls from him, across 14 Tests, and was out only four times. "I think it's mainly because I've kept a lot to Murali," he explained, "so I've had to learn to read deliveries from the hand."

Their most epic showdowns came during Sri Lanka's 2011 tour of the UAE: Sangakkara scored 516 runs, Ajmal picked up 18 wickets, and they shared the Player of the Series award after Pakistan won the three-Test series 1-0.

Sri Lanka were in a dire situation in the second innings of the first Test. They had been shot out for 197 on the first day, and Pakistan had taken a 314-run lead thanks to a double-hundred from Taufeeq Umar. Profiting from a series of dropped chances, Sangakkara and Lahiru Thirimanne put on 153 for the second wicket, but Pakistan kept creating more chances, and chipped away at the wickets to leave Sri Lanka 233 for 5, still 81 runs short of avoiding innings defeat.

Sangakkara was on 121, and the second new ball was one ball old when Prasanna joined him in the final session of day four. They batted through to stumps - Sri Lanka were still 16 behind at this point - and on and on in the Abu Dhabi heat on the fifth day, until Sangakkara was out in the last over before tea. By then, he had made 211 off 431 balls, spent close to 11 hours at the crease, and made safety all but certain.

Sri Lanka's last Test win had come in July 2010, in Muralitharan's final appearance. They had played 15 Tests since then, losing or drawing all of them. They had been thumped by an innings in their most recent Test match, in Centurion. No one expected them to challenge South Africa in the second Test. But on a dry, almost subcontinental Kingsmead surface, they were dominating. Thilan Samaraweera set the game up with a first-innings 102, and Chanaka Welegedara and Rangana Herath ran through South Africa to secure a 170-run lead.

Sangakkara had done close to nothing so far on the tour: his visits to the crease had brought him scores of 1, 2 and 0. But the scent of a South African comeback roused him to life. Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel ripped out Sri Lanka's openers, and when Mahela Jayawardene joined them in the hut, the score was 44 for 3.

Having survived an early edge off Morkel - which flew between wicketkeeper and first slip with neither making an attempt to catch the ball - Sangakkara calmly re-established Sri Lanka's dominance, putting on 94 with Samaraweera for the fourth wicket and 104 with Dinesh Chandimal for the sixth to extend the lead beyond 400 and beyond South Africa's reach. Chasing 450, they were bowled out for 241.

Having crossed 70 three times on two previous trips to South Africa - back in 2000-01 and 2002-03 - without converting any of those efforts into centuries, Sangakkara screamed through the nineties with successive fours off Jacques Kallis before bringing up the landmark with a square-drive for two. He had now made hundreds in every Test-hosting country apart from the West Indies.

In six previous visits to the crease at Lord's, Sangakkara had only made 140 runs at 28.00. None of his innings there, as yet, had come to rival his 2011 Spirit of Cricket lecture as his greatest moment at cricket's spiritual home. On his final tour of England, he had one last shot at getting his name up on the honours board, in perfect batting conditions but a far from ideal situation. The openers had given Sri Lanka a decent start, but 54 for 1 was a long way from England's first-innings score of 575.

Sangakkara flicked the first ball he faced to the midwicket boundary, and from there on looked utterly at ease on a slow pitch, pressing forward at every opportunity and using his hands expertly to manoeuvre the ball into the off-side gaps. He put on 97 with Kaushal Silva for the second wicket, 126 with Mahela Jayawardene for the third, and 96 with Angelo Mathews for the fifth.

Appropriately enough, his old mate Jayawardene was at the other end when he leaned into a trademark bent-knee cover drive to bring up his hundred. Sangakkara raised his arms and moved his elbows up and down like a weightlifter. Jayawardene jumped onto his back, startling his partner and giving him the only real moment of discomfort in an innings that flowed serenely from start to finish.

Sangakkara's century and his 61 in the second innings went a long way towards helping Sri Lanka save the Test match, just about, with their last pair at the crease. Sri Lanka won the next Test, at Headingley, and sealed their second ever series win in England.

Returning to a venue where he had played one of his greatest knocks nine years earlier, Sangakkara found himself in a familiar situation. Replying to New Zealand's 221, Sri Lanka were 18 for 1 when he walked in, and 78 for 5 as the batsmen struggled to cope against Trent Boult, Tim Southee and Doug Bracewell.

Sangakkara fought the conditions and the difficulties he had lately endured against Boult's left-arm swing as he gritted it out initially, putting on 130 with Dinesh Chandimal as Sri Lanka clawed their way back into the game.

At the fall of Chandimal's wicket, Sri Lanka were still trailing by 13. Sangakkara farmed the strike expertly, scoring his last 110 runs off 125 balls in the company of the tail, while letting numbers eight, nine and ten face only 69 balls between them. By the time he was done, Sri Lanka had a 135-run lead.

BJ Watling, who had a pretty good view of Sangakkara's innings from behind the stumps, called it "a demonstration of how to play from a world class player."

Watling went on to show how much he had learned from the demonstration. New Zealand were 159 for 5 - effectively 24 for 5 - when he walked out to bat in their second innings. From there, he and Kane Williamson added an unbroken 365 that turned imminent defeat into one of New Zealand's greatest victories.