A day with Kumar Sangakkara, club cricketer: ‘This is bigger than watching Messi – it’s like Pele’

Kumar Sangakkara scored 12,400 Test runs, including 38 centuries, in a 15-year career playing for Sri Lanka. His latest hundred, however, came at a village ground in Dorset, on the south coast of England, where he sent sixes soaring into the car park.

To reach Witchampton Cricket Club, visitors — on this occasion, Shillingstone CC and their star batter — must travel up a track beside the local nursery school. Philippa Bowles, a player’s mother, prepared the snacks and drinks for the teams to recharge during the tea interval, and a 14-year-old shared the field with the former Sri Lanka captain, now aged 48.

Sangakkara’s route into pay-to-play village cricket, where amateurs hand over a match fee, runs through the school his children attend, a friendship spanning 25 years and a village pub brought back from closure.

More than 50 people watched from the boundary on the day The Athletic visits, including Nicholas Berry, 53, who coaches the Witchampton women’s team and had never seen Sangakkara bat in person. He had been due on stage that afternoon, singing and playing the ukulele and guitar, and says his bandmates were not best pleased when he pulled out after discovering Sangakkara would be playing.

“I’ve got another gig tomorrow, so that’s fine,” Berry says. “Today is about watching Kumar play cricket.”

Children from Witchampton’s junior section ate ice lollies beside the boundary. Some did not know who Sangakkara was, so the adults explained his stature in football terms: imagine Lionel Messi turning out for a Sunday League team. Berry thought even that comparison undersells it.

“This is bigger than that,” he says. “It’s like Pele.”

A few appeals for leg before wicket prompted murmurs among the spectators. One warned that an umpire would need to be “more than 100 per cent certain” before giving Sangakkara out.

The caution was understandable. Sangakkara captained Sri Lanka, remains the country’s leading Test run-scorer and is the only player to make four consecutive centuries in one-day internationals. He later served as president of Marylebone Cricket Club, based at Lord’s — the stadium known worldwide as ‘The home of cricket’.

Berry had watched that career unfold on television and says he was close to tears when they posed for a photograph outside the pavilion.

“The elegance, poise and grace are still there,” Berry says. “He has so much time on the ball. It’s just the same, which makes it even better.”

Sangakkara’s explanation for playing for Shillingstone is less grand.

“All my friends play for Shillies,” he says. “If you want to be part of the community, you need to turn up once in a while and play for the village team.

“It’s great fun — making friends, going to the pub in the evening and chatting. It’s never about just coming in and playing cricket. It’s more about being part of the community and the friendships that are built.”

That connection began with a family decision.

Sangakkara and wife Yehali moved permanently to England in early 2022 after choosing a co-educational school for their twins, who were 13 at the time and are now 17.

“We went around a lot of schools,” he says. “We decided that was the school for us, so we moved to Dorset because of the school.”

The twins do not play cricket and Dad has never tried to push them towards the sport. “They’ve chosen their own paths,” he says. “They’re very happy doing what they do.”

The move brought Sangakkara closer to Charlie Austin, 51, his manager and friend of 25 years.

Austin was working in cricket media in Sri Lanka when they met. He ran respected cricket website Cricinfo’s operation in the country for about a decade, and first watched Sangakkara in youth and A-team cricket before he became one of his earliest clients.

Their families grew close during Austin’s 23 years in Sri Lanka. Their children attended the same school there and later enrolled at the same one in Dorset after both families moved to the UK at around the same time.

Austin returned to club cricket and is now in his second year as Shillingstone’s captain. Sangakkara initially came along just to watch matches, met the players and gradually became part of the group.

The club discussed whether it would be fair to ask one of cricket’s greatest batsmen to play in their local league. Nobody pressed him until Shillingstone found themselves short of players for one match.

“We just said, ‘Let’s ask’,” Austin says. “He said, ‘Yeah, why not?’ He came down and genuinely enjoyed it.”

The invitation gave Sangakkara a place in the team, but his connection to Shillingstone soon extended beyond the boundary.

The club’s players and their opponents traditionally gathered after matches at the village’s Old Ox Inn. When the pub closed in January, members of the cricket club and wider community took on the lease and reopened it during the first week of May.

Austin is one of three directors, while around 12 people loaned money to help return the pub to use. Any surplus is intended to be reinvested in the Old Ox, the cricket club and the broader community. Sangakkara was among those to support the project.

He has experience in hospitality through the Ministry of Crab, a restaurant business he co-founded in Sri Lanka, but does not regard the Old Ox as a commercial venture.

“It’s nothing to do with making a business out of it,” he says. “It’s about keeping that centre of the community alive. Everyone ends up there at some point or another, especially after games. That’s where memories are kept alive and people build that sense of togetherness.”

The effort to reopen the pub grew from relationships formed around cricket. Austin says the club has spent the past four or five years attracting new players and welcoming people of different ages and standards.

A recent fundraising day attracted an estimated 250 to 300 spectators and was expected to raise around £2,000 each for Shillingstone and School in a Bag, a charity providing educational equipment to disadvantaged children. Sangakkara’s presence has added to that momentum.

His name has the star power to alter a fixture before anybody reaches the ground.

Austin sometimes delays publishing the team sheet because opposition clubs have a habit of finding extra players once they discover a certain somebody will be involved. None have complained about going up against a former Test-level batter, he says; most welcome the chance to face him.

Within the Shillingstone side, Sangakkara is generally relaxed, talks to his team-mates and offers advice. His international past becomes more obvious if a match tightens up and the result is in the balance, a change the players call “Test-match mode”.

“His intensity level goes about three notches beyond where any of us can go,” Austin says. “We drop a lot of catches and we’re pretty ill-disciplined in the field. He’s constantly changing my field placings and wanting me to change the bowling.”

The same seriousness carries into his batting.

Sangakkara spent his international career facing bowlers operating at 80 or 90mph. At village level, Austin says, he may at best come up against somebody operating closer to 50mph, but gives each delivery the same attention.

“There wasn’t a single ball where he looked complacent,” Austin says. “He plays every ball on its merits. We can see the method and the plan. Obviously, the ability is beyond anything we have by several leagues, but we learn from the way he builds an innings.”

Sangakkara also speaks to opponents, signs autographs and stays for a drink after matches and has even been bowling with his “filthy off-spin”. His appearances remain occasional because of his commentary work and other commitments, but there is no retirement plan for this version of his career.

“As long as I’m having fun and all my friends are playing, I’ll turn up once in a while,” he says. “You have everyone, of all ages and all levels, coming and playing cricket together. It’s structured, it’s competitive and it’s recreational. There’s room for everyone.

“When sport becomes part of the community, it’s in good health.”

That inclusiveness does not protect him from the game itself, as his three most recent appearances for Shillingstone show: 168 not out, a nine-ball duck and another century.

The unbeaten 168 came from 117 balls against Broadstone and included 16 fours and 11 sixes. On Saturday, his latest hundred helped Shillingstone reach 282 for nine before Witchampton finished on 206 for seven, a 76-run victory that kept the visitors second in the 10-team division.

Between the two centuries came that duck against Cerne Valley, his wicket taken by Craig Kellaway.

Kellaway, 35, is a mortgage underwriter who has played for Cerne Valley since he was about 10. He described himself as a medium-paced bowler and expected Sangakkara, fresh from making 168, to produce another substantial score.

Cerne Valley took an early wicket, so Sangakkara, batting at No 3, arrived at the crease inside the first six overs.

“You think, ‘I’m bowling at Kumar Sangakkara now — this is amazing’,” Kellaway says. “But I just tried to treat him like he was any other batsman. I’m not quick. I targeted the stumps, he clipped it to one of our fielders and, luckily, the fielder caught it.”

Some spectators had come along specifically to watch Sangakkara bat and did not see him score a single run, but Kellaway says, “they were patting me on the back, ‘Well done, you’ve just got Kumar’.”

He did not ask Sangakkara for a photograph or autograph, did not keep the ball he got him out with as a memento, and has resisted suggestions that he should frame the scorebook, although he accepts the dismissal may eventually become something to tell his grandchildren about.

Cerne Valley still lost the match. When the players went to the pub afterwards, Kellaway bought his own round, despite having dismissed one of cricket’s greatest batsmen. “We were probably more annoyed that we didn’t win the game,” he says.

The wicket nevertheless travelled through the league’s pubs and WhatsApp groups.

Before Kellaway’s next match, opposition players arrived asking, “Who’s Craig?”

There’s never any need to ask who the Sri Lankan batter is when Shillingstone play.