Kumar Sangakkara: how civil war and 2004 tsunami helped me keep terrorist attack in perspective
Tuesday 1 August 2017 22:45, UK
Kumar Sangakkara says the memories of growing up in a war-torn country and witnessing the devastation caused by the 2004 tsunami helped him keep the 2009 terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, in Lahore, in perspective.
Sangakkara and his team-mates were en route to the Gaddafi stadium when their bus was ambushed by gun men, who killed six members of their police escort and two civilians.
Thilan Samaraweera, Tharanga Paranavitana and reserve umpire Ahsan Raza - travelling with the match officials in a separate minibus - were badly injured in the attack, while Sangakkara was one of several players to receive minor injuries.
In an in-depth interview with Michael Atherton covering his life and cricket career, which you can listen to in full by downloading the podcast here, the 39-year-old spoke about how the squad came together in the aftermath of the attack
"We got into the ground, which was only 500 metres from this Liberty Stadium roundabout; there was very rudimentary security, of course, and unfortunately most of the security personnel who were guarding us died and that was tragic," said Sangakkara.
"They tried to shoot the bus driver and missed him by a couple of inches. That's probably why we survived - because he was left alive to drive us through that.
"Every day he takes about four attempts to get into this ground through this narrow gate but this time he did it in just one perfect take, driving straight into the ground.
"Thilan has been shot very badly and is bleeding everywhere - he gets taken by ambulance to hospital. Ajantha Mendis and I were due to get in the next ambulance but they were shooting next to the ambulance so we thought 'listen, we'll stay here'.
"Then, of course, being us, being Sri Lankan - 10 minutes into this, suddenly there's a little joke from one side and another from that end and a little bit of laughter and suddenly everyone starts breathing, talking, chatting, but at no time did we feel sorry for ourselves.
"We didn't get together in a huddle and say 'oh my god, why us?' I think a lot of the talk was about surprise that - we'd gone through three or four minutes of what other people go through every day.
"We have people who have laid down their lives for their country, we had people fighting on the side of the military, we had innocent people dying with various suicide attacks, people caught in a war zone.
"It was amazing to watch this team just talk about things like that rather than saying 'oh my god, what about cricket? What are we going to do?'
"With eight hours to go before our plane came, Ajantha Mendis comes in fully bandaged up with his pack of cards and his poker chips and says 'we've got eight hours, we've got to do something'. Within a month we were all back playing cricket.
"All these things helped us to understand that, listen, 'why not us? What makes us so special that we can't be attacked or go through something like this? Isn't it our responsibility that if you do, that you get on back with life as best you can."
Sangakkara has done just that in the 18 years since, amassing over 12,000 Test runs and, even with retirement approaching at the end of the summer, maintains the hard work ethic installed in him by his father Kshema, striving to groove his technique to such a point that it becomes second nature or, as he describes it, "The zen-Buddhist theory of no mind - having absolutely nothing that impedes that instinctive reaction that you've trained your body to do.
"It takes a lot of work [to get to that stage]. I remember in the Big Bash I was speaking to D'Arcy Short, one of our openers, and was talking about without over-thinking it, without pre-meditating it - just do what the ball tells you to do.
"He batted and he came back and said, 'I was thinking so hard about keeping my mind empty…' I said, 'ok, I understand what you mean'.
"If you are making a change, it's no use having throw-downs - you need to bat against bowling. No matter how comfortable you feel against a throw-down, it's very different when you are batting because the moment you are faced with, especially, fast bowling your natural instincts automatically sometimes take over and those movements that then happen are actually the movements you should be making, not trying to temper those movements or impede them with technique or things you think you should be doing.
"Whatever gets that bat to the ball in a manner that is going to be effective - and in a manner that you can repeat long enough to score runs - is the way really that you should think batting and that should happen when you are facing a ball without you even being aware of it."
