(UTV | COLOMBO) – Sri Lanka batting great Kumar Sangakkara among the 10 legends of the game to be inducted into the ICC Hall of Fame on Sunday.
The inductees have been classified into five broad eras: Noble and Aubrey Faulkner from the pre-World War 1 period (early era), Learie Constantine and Stan McCabe from the period between the two World Wars (inter-war era), Vinoo Mankad and Ted Dexter from 1946 to 1970 (post-war era), Bob Willis and Desmond Haynes from 1971 to 1995 (ODI era), and Andy Flower and Sangakkara from 1996 to 2015 (modern era).
Sangakkara is Sri Lanka’s leading run-getter, with 12,400 runs at 57.40 – the highest average among all batters to have scored more than 9000 Test runs.
A left-hander who batted with a methodical elegance, Sangakkara’s numbers as a specialist batter are even more astonishing: 9283 runs at 66.78, with 31 hundreds in just 86 Tests. A prolific white-ball player too, Sangakkara was a leading light in the Sri Lanka teams that finished as losing finalists at the 2009 and 2012 World T20s as well as the 2007 and 2011 World Cups, and the Player of the Match when Sri Lanka beat India in the final of the 2014 World T20 in Dhaka. As eloquent off the field as he was chirpy behind the stumps, Sangakkara in 2019 became the first non-British person to be appointed president of the MCC.