A T-shirt of theirs read as follows: 'One day you will meet a goal, that you'll want to marry and have kids with.'Īnyone who saw Maradona against England in '86 will agree that the T-shirt speaks truth. When the English toured in 1993, their supporters arrived in droves and formed a jolly, beer sipping troupe called the Barmy Army. I see beauty in free kicks, late cuts, slam dunks, tries from half-way, and in balls that turn from off to leg. Some people gaze at setting suns, sitting mountains, teenage virgins and their wiggling thighs. But beauty, who has not an eye for that? Even the gemba on the lotus notices the butterfly. I lay no claims to being a poet or a philosopher or a connoisseur of anything other than old arrack.

I admit to being a hack and, in my personal life, to being a tad uncouth. Your wife and family vs the All Blacks vs the Chicago Bulls vs Bloomfield CC. When you say it like that it sounds ludicrous. I told her then that she was talking nonsense. She asked me this a long time ago, when boys on motorbikes, wielding Das Capital and T-56s, had the nation facedown in the sand. More than I do my son and our life together. My wife asks me why I love sport more than her. Here, WG ponders his reasons for going on this quest. Retired sports journalist, WG Karunasena decides to find out what became of Mathew and why he never fulfilled his potential. Today those who remember Mathew describe him as the most gifted Sri Lankan cricketer to ever walk the earth. The Legend of a Pradeep Mathew is the story of a left-arm spin bowler for Bloomfield cricket club and Sri Lanka in the 1980s. Selected by Waterstones as a Top 11 debut of 2011.Ĭhosen by Wisden in 2020 as the second greatest cricket book of all time. Winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize 2012, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012, and the Gratiaen Prize 2008. Published by Random House India/Jonathan Cape UK.

Shehan chinaman