Sangakkara 2.0 makes final upgrade

In the back garden of a colonial home sitting snug against a hill above Kandy, Kshema Sangakkara sends throwdowns at his youngest son. Kumar is in his teens, and has become enamoured again with cricket after stints of badminton and tennis. Kshema doesn't mind his switching sports. But he is firm that his son excels. So on weekend mornings, he rouses Kumar for hours of technical work and shadow batting. Who could have known then, it would one day come to so much?

As Kumar Sangakkara enters the final phase of his career, he may reflect that he has been perhaps the most transformed batsmen of his era. Early-issue Sangakkara was a steady but limited accumulator, wielding an impulsive, imprecise version of that bent-kneed cover drive, and not many other powerful scoring shots to go with it. The livewire that has taken his final World Cup by the collar is a one-day wonder.

That cover drive still grounds his attacking game, like a bassline to his rhythm of singles and twos. But the higher end of his range is now extraordinary. The slog sweeps, whip-pulls, slashes, ramps and over-the-shoulder scoops send his innings and his audience soaring. He has made 372 runs at a strike rate of 116.25 in a tournament where No. 3 batsmen have largely sought to hunker down, then cede focus to the hitters in the middle order.

As he prepares for his final handful of ODIs, maybe Sangakkara will also know what has allowed him to build his cricket so relentlessly - to pile addition upon addition, a slew of renovations thrown in, all interlocking together to give speed to the whole. He has spent long weeks in the nets, fine-tuning this, redressing that, but all these changes were borne from something older, and much more elemental. Maybe he will reflect that it was on that Kandy hillside, that he acquired the basis for his dizzying success. Because it was not the balls that his father - a modest cricketer himself - threw him, that has made Sangakkara great. It was the words.

"My father has been coaching me day in, day out," Sangakkara said recently. "But he's always told me: 'Don't be afraid of change.' I think that's the best thing I've been told, and that's what I've been doing throughout my career - change when change was required. I tried to improve, and it's been the background to my success."

He could hardly have espoused this philosophy more completely. While Mahela Jayawardene and Avishka Gunawardene were blazing through the school cricket system in the mid-1990s, Sangakkara was just a quaint name from the hills: a wicketkeeper-batsman with promise, but no sure thing to progress to national colours. His first spells at the top level were brittle, unsteady. After 35 ODI innings, his average was 21.86. After 75 knocks, it was still languishing in the mid-20s. A strike rate of less than 70 was no saving grace.

Kshema has ever been Sangakkara's first port of advice, and so after each mediocre stretch, after each extended dip in belief, it is his father Sangakkara goes to. The two often don't agree. Sangakkara has been coached by some of the greatest names in his sport. He routinely plays for TV audiences in the tens of millions. So there are aspects of cricket Kshema does not understand, he feels. The father, meanwhile says the notes the son spurns are the most crucial to his game. There is fuss. There is friction. But there is also abundant fruit.

Across the years, with his father's help, Sangakkara has through tireless refinement, devised one of the most efficient all-format, all-condition techniques of all time. His current trigger movement is unrecognisable from the one he began with. His strokes are all so clean and precise, they could have come shrink-wrapped from the lab. Ask any top coach now which left-hander they model their young players on. Ask a statistician which batsman scores runs with the most control and consistency in every corner of the world. His peers have certainly taken notice.

"He's certainly as good as any player I've played against," Michael Clarke said of Sangakkara last week. "Kumar and Jacques Kallis are two guys I've looked up to and think if they played for different countries, they could quite easily be regarded as the best ever. I think he's batted at No. 3 for a lot of his career, in Test and one day cricket. It's a really tough position, he's scored runs all around the world against some very good bowling attacks. He's been the number one batter in the world for a long, long time."

The match against Scotland could at worst be Sangakkara's penultimate one-day game. At best it could be his fourth-to-last outing. Across one ocean and a continent, fans in Sangakkara's island will be waking up to catch every moment of his sunset, because when he is at the crease he makes a nation feel secure. But it was not safety that has brought the man himself this far. Sangakkara has explored and evolved, without end, and without fear, the words of his father ringing in his ears.