Jayawardene unplugged
Mahela Jayawardene talks to the Guardian 's Donald McRae about the terrorist attacks on the Sri Lanka team in Lahore in 2009, the tragedy of his brother's brain tumour and, among other things, Muttiah Muralitharan.
Nikita Bastian
25-Feb-2013
Mahela Jayawardene talks to the Guardian's Donald McRae about the terrorist attacks on the Sri Lanka team in Lahore in 2009, the tragedy of his brother's brain tumour and, among other things, Muttiah Muralitharan.
"I still get flashbacks," he says of that day in Lahore when a dozen masked gunmen attacked them. "At first, the guys were saying, 'Why would anyone let off crackers at eight in the morning?' But then someone shouted: 'No, they're shooting at us – get down' ... Two or three times, lying on the floor, I thought, 'There is no way we're going to get through this.' There was no talking – just screaming and shouting. Whenever anyone got hit by shrapnel they would scream..."
The scars remain. During the World Cup, "we were on a bus in India and crackers went off. A couple of guys almost went down because it was the exact noise we'd heard in Pakistan."
Nikita Bastian is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo