Do we like Kumar Sangakkara?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent, on the right side of the board-room fights, and nothing harmful turned up, though we found little on his views about LGBTQ+ people.
Kumar Sangakkara was born in Matale in 1977 and grew up in a family that prized education, in a home overlooking Kandy Lake. His father was a respected lawyer, and young Kumar was the schoolboy who sang in the choir, played the violin and read widely. He started a law degree and never finished it, because cricket got in the way.
The cricket side is the stuff of legend. He debuted in 2000 as a wicketkeeper-batsman, and in 2006 he and Mahela Jayawardene put on 624 for the third wicket against South Africa, the highest partnership in first-class cricket. He captained Sri Lanka to the 2009 World Twenty20 final and the 2011 World Cup final, and retired with 12,400 Test runs.
The moment that defined him off the field came in 2011, when he gave the MCC's Cowdrey Lecture at Lord's. He used it to take aim at politics in Sri Lankan cricket, describing vote buying, rigging and violence at board elections and calling for professional, transparent administration. He closed with the line “I am today, and always, proudly Sri Lankan.” He later said it was “a story I felt I needed to tell.”
The trouble he has had is mostly small. In 2014 he was fined 15 per cent of his match fee for dissent after arguing with an umpire over the batting Powerplay, and he admitted the offence. The bigger stoush came in 2020, when a former sports minister alleged that Sri Lanka threw the 2011 World Cup final. Sangakkara was among those questioned, and police then dropped the inquiry saying they found no evidence of wrongdoing.
On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up: no slurs, no conspiracy theories, no culture-war grifting, and no run of projects with people who push that stuff. Honestly, we also found nothing on where he stands on LGBTQ+ or trans rights, so this is a pass on what we could find, not a shout-out. His public fights have been against political meddling in cricket.
The good stuff is practical. He and Jayawardene were the brainchild of the Murali Harmony Cup, a Foundation of Goodness tournament that in 2012 took organised matches to the north of Sri Lanka, an area recovering from the civil war. The foundation had backing from the ICC and the Sri Lankan Army, so how you see it may depend on how you see the army.