Sangakkara's Last Supper

Kumar Sangakkara batted at the SCG on Wednesday as if this would be his last innings; increasingly, as Sri Lankan wickets fell, it looked like it would be.

The retiring great had seen dozens of teammates come and go in his 15-year international career, and from the non-striker's end he saw a few more as South Africa took control of the first World Cup quarterfinal. Sangakkara came in at 1-3 and went out at 9-127, a boy on a burning deck, now as so often in the past.

Sri Lanka had made two World Cup finals on Sangakkara's watch, but there would not be a third. They are going home. Meanwhile, if the semifinal-bound South Africans had been told their day would be this easy, they might have choked on their breakfast cereal.

For much of the afternoon, circumstances forced Sangakkara to play an old-school one-day innings. A sporting wicket made to order for South Africa's fast bowlers revived memories of the SCG in its pacy 70s. Bounce accounted for both of Sri Lanka's openers. One delivery from Morne Morkel to Sangakkara steepled so suddenly that it flew over wicketkeeper Quinton de Kock's vertical leap for four byes. Kyle Abbott and Dale Steyn found enough seam and bounce to trouble any batsmen, let alone the Sri Lankans who must have been wondering what had transformed last week's sleepy surface into this rager.

Sangakkara adapted. From his first 23 balls, he took two singles to fine leg and no risks running between wickets; no chance was his international career going to end on the SCG like Mike Hussey's. From his first 42 balls, Sangakkara -- who is yet to draw the curtain on his Test career -- scored six runs. Any other batsman in the world, and the crowd would have been screaming at him. Instead, there was an "Artist at Work" kind of hum, an appreciation for the difficulty of the task. His authority alone was recalibrating notions of a par score, from 300 down to 200 and perhaps even less, as rapidly as a storm front blowing from the North Sea onto the Old Course. When great players struggle, the game becomes harder for all players. But this would turn out to be wishful thinking when Sri Lanka's bowlers proved as incapable of exploiting the conditions as their batsmen.

JP Duminy then took over, dismissing three batsmen off successive balls spread across two overs. Something was contagious in the Sri Lankan batting, and it wasn't greatness. Sangakkara could do nothing except swap his bat for Nuwan Kulasekara's and hope he could put it to better use. The Duminy hattrick prompted Sangakkara to switch from first gear straight into fifth, and he slogged his second and third boundaries off Abbott's next over with Kulasekara's bat.

A gentleman from the erstwhile SCG hill then took the field, dropped his trousers, and proceeded to do to the turf what South Africa was doing to Sri Lanka's batting. The delay might have been critical: two balls later, Sangakkara sliced a cut shot high to third man and his innings, his most wonderful career, was over. Right on cue, a curtain of rain was lowered over his exit; a poignant farewell for this fine cricketing man.

The author is a sports columnist and wrote this article for the Sydney Morning Herald