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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pata" data-source="post: 549365" data-attributes="member: 2136">There’s some bad blood when Sri Lankan and English players are involved in a cricket series. The seeds of hatred were first thrown when England toured Sri Lanka in 2001 after a lay off of eight years for a series that lasted for two months. New friends such as Andrew Flintoff and Muttiah Muralitharan have helped to mend things, but players of the two sides and to a bigger extent the supporters of England and Sri Lanka will find the incidents of 2001 hard to forget. One of the most heated moments during that series was the confrontation between Kumar Sangakkara and Michael Atherton. It’s so strange that the former England captain had to lose his cool against a rookie, which was what Sangakkara at that time and that happened to be Atherton’s last series away from home. The fact is that Sangakkara was different from most other players even at that stage and if you picked to mess with him, you had chosen the wrong guy.In the second Test in Kandy, there were several contentious umpiring decisions that had robbed what would have been great game of cricket. Sri Lanka on this instance were at the receiving end. A few of their wicketkeeper Kumar Sangakkara’s appeals had been negated by umpires Rudi Koertzen and B.C. Cooray.Sangakkara had been needling the English players putting their mental strength to test in a heated game and some English players were waiting for an opportunity.Atherton was having a terrible tour and had become a regular victim to the combination of Sangakkara-Vaas and the veteran had decided to take on the rookie when he came to bat.As soon as Sangakkara came to bat in the second innings, Atherton accused Sangakkara of cheating and Sri Lanka’s young wicketkeeper batsman hit back much to the surprise of the ‘English scholar’."Cheat, what do you mean by a cheat," Sangakkara is supposed to have asked Atherton."What about the dirt in the pocket. Is that not cheating," he had added reminding Atherton of his darkest moment in cricket.Atherton got into trouble when he used sand to dry the cricket ball during England’s cricket tour of West Indies in 1993, one of his first assignments as captain and subsequently had been penalised by the ECB (Then TCCB) for bringing the game to disrepute.Athers soon lost his composure and got into an argument with the player and was later summoned by Match Referee Hanumanth Singh for another hearing.As for Sangakkara, he carried on without being troubled.Michael Atherton in his autobiography ‘Opening Up’ later admitted that he realised not to mess with Sangakkara, who not only knew cricket history but also had the fluency of the language to give it back.For often, the Sri Lankans had been ‘gentle souls’ taking all the crap from teams like Australia, England and South Africa, but the emergence of players like Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene had allowed them to rub it in cleverly.Nasser Hussain, a colleague of Atherton, calls Sangakkara ‘a crafty bugger’ in his autobiography ‘Playing with Fire’.Hussain reminds how Sangakkara constantly reminded him that he was only one innings away from getting dropped from the England side and that how he had dropped Graham Smith in Test Match on one allowing the new South African captain to go onto make a double hundred.Sangakkara’s consistent batting and excellent wicket keeping has made him one of the most feared batsmen in world cricket today. His clever barbs meanwhile has exposed the best of world’s best batsman and most teams keep away from sledging the Sri Lankan wicketkeeper fearing the worst when his chance comes.</blockquote>

Verification: Hathara warak wissa keeyada? (Hathara wadi karanna 20)

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