Sangakkara: putting runs where his mouth once was

No matter how much he attempts to distance himself from it now, Kumar Sangakkara was once a serial sledger. He has often been asked about his verbal spats in recent interviews and has usually been quick to assert he has "probably mellowed over the years". It's true. He has rarely gone looking for trouble this decade, and has only occasionally added his voice to the volleys his team-mates fire at batsmen - rare in themselves. But on the eve of his farewell, a jaunt into his combative past might help us better gauge the man he has become.

It's important to put his sledging in context. Early 2000s Sangakkara was basically a batting limpet. That desire to become the best has always blazed inside him, but his cricket was a little limited. He specialised in looking like he won't survive the next over, yet was the man oppositions just could not shake off. He batted long and slow. The likes of Sanath Jayasuriya, Aravinda de Silva and Mahela Jayawardene slashed and drove around him.

It was while he was this top-order medicine in Sri Lanka's candy shop of aggressive delights that Sangakkara spent his most garrulous years. Behind the stumps in a famously spicy 2002-03 tour of South Africa, he was a mosquito buzzing around batsmen's heads, always yapping on about a slip-up in a recent press conference, about an opponent's poor form, or the pressure they were under. His "weight of all these expectations" rant to Shaun Pollock is the most famous example. Other times he delivered scathing one-liners. "Hey Bhajji," he was heard saying to Harbhajan Singh when he came out to bat on one occasion, "you look handsome in your short sleeves. Why don't you wear them when you bowl?" He copped a fine for the minor altercation that followed.

In public, he sometimes seemed caught between owning his reputation for being one of the wittier sledgers in the game and playing down his use of words. As a 26-year-old, he spoke professorially on the subject: "The public perception of sledging is to go out there and abuse someone in obscene language, questioning their parentage or sexual preferences. That kind of abuse does not belong on the field of play. Sledging, as coined and pioneered by the Australians, is a measured comment designed to get a reaction out of a player." Okay, poindexter, but what are you trying to say? That the Australians never made jibes about sexual orientation? That you didn't either?

About eight months later, not only did he say he "would never practise sledging or use it as a tactic" unless heckled first, but that sledging altogether "doesn't belong on the cricket field" and is "not the way the game should be played". Words at clear odds with his actions here, he comes off looking a little like Genghis Khan wearing a "make love, not war" t-shirt.

The picture of Sangakkara that emerges from these early interactions with opposition and media is of a young man seeking to set himself apart and become noticed, but also of someone a little unsure of himself. The barbs which dug at opposition insecurities seem to have been made sharper, in hindsight, by his own experiences with self-doubt.

Latter day Sangakkara, though, is a transformed man. He is now more likely to cast aspersions on his own cricket than jab at opponents. Before the last Test match in Galle, he said he did not understand how anyone could find his batting attractive. At other times, when he has been held up alongside other batting greats, he has been self-effacing. "If I've matched Brian Lara, I've matched him in very little," he said last year, when he drew level with Lara's nine 200-plus scores. He would go on to score two more within 10 months.

In his latest, most sublime years, Sangakkara has mauled attacks with a creativity and fearlessness that had eluded him in the first half of his career, but his lips have become ever more still (apart from, of course, when he is appealing). Maybe he has learned to save his best lines for when a standing ovation is on offer. More likely, after crossing the 30 Test hundreds and 10,000 runs threshold, he has been at peace with himself. In some innings, like against England at the recent World Cup, a century has seemed almost inevitable since the early moments.

The tons now are celebrated with restraint. The bat comes up slowly. The helmet usually stays on. Sometimes he even looks bored. In 2014 he struck more international runs than anyone has managed in a calendar year, but his most animated moment was at the non-striker's end in Bangladesh, when team-mate Kaushal Silva reached his maiden hundred.

As his farewell Test arrives now, it seems like the whole occasion is not really for Sangakkara, just as a funeral is not really for the deceased. Sangakkara has been adamant that no exorbitant fanfare is made of his exit. There were no cutouts on the Galle Fort, as there had been for Muttiah Muralitharan and Jayawardene. The board had offered to move his final Test to his home town of Kandy, but the man himself had wanted no change of plans. It is the fans who need the closure. Sangakkara has been ready to depart for some time now.

The island has been divided along its many fault lines this week. The general election on Monday was peaceful, but closely contested. Rural Sri Lanka went one way. The cities went another. The north and east headed in another direction entirely. But so complete has Sangakkara's metamorphosis as person and cricketer been, that the nation will come together to celebrate him as one. Once a mouthy prick, now the sultan of slick, Sangakkara retires content.