It’s too early to tell whether Lasith Malinga will go down in history as a fast-bowling great but his impact on Sri Lankan cricket in the few short years he’s been playing the game has been immense.
His captain Mahela Jayawardene says: “He’s a brilliant example for all young cricketers in Sri Lanka. Here’s a boy who came from an out-station with no cricket background and has reached the top. Batsman, bowler, it doesn’t matter where you are from, Lasith shows that if you’re good enough you’re going to make it.”
Make it he has. His unique sling-shot bowling action has brought him over 150 international wickets in just three years. He’s attracted attention the world over for his incredible, round-arm action, his whole-hearted performances and – of course – his irrepressible hair. Not since the heyday of Hanna-Barbera have our TV screens been so full of such follicular fabulousness. The hair changes for every series. Malinga doesn’t. He is still the same, small-town boy who just loves to bowl.
“I like to keep it simple – the bowling at least,” he smiles. Nor does he touch his leonine hair once, when our official catches up with him over dinner in Colombo. Twenty-four years ago, in a small fishing town called Rathgama on Sri Lanka’s south-west coast, Lasith Malinga was born. Eleven years later he started playing cricket on a beach facing the Indian Ocean. Seven years ago he held a leather ball for the first time. “It felt so heavy, so strange,” he says. “It was like something from another world.”
That was for a school match in Galle, his first ‘proper’ game ever. He took 14 wickets. Malinga broke through into the Sri Lankan side just three years later. Now, with his lethal 88mph yorkers emerging unreadably from somewhere in front of the umpire’s chest, he has become Sri Lanka’s pace-bowling spearhead. He has a Test strike-rate – 35 – that is considerably better than that both of colleagues like Chaminda Vaas and Muttiah Muralitharan and opponents like Brett Lee and Makhaya Ntini.
In 2007, against South Africa at the World Cup, Malinga became the first man in the history of international cricket to take four wickets in four balls. It could have been five. “I missed the fifth by nothing,” he says. “The ball just missed the stump.” And the edge of Charl Langeveldt’s bat, as Sri Lanka came within a whisker of pulling off an incredible victory. “
When the team needs something to happen, I get the ball,” says the man they call the Slinger. “I always think I can get a wicket at any time of a match. New ball, old ball, reverse-swing, ordinary swing: I can do it.” We’re eating at Colombo’s Cricket Club Café, in a restaurant where dishes are named after cricketing legends home and abroad. (No dish has been named after Malinga yet.) Malinga has always been someone to watch. He was a natural talent from the moment he ever bowled a ball. But talent in a one-road town a long way away from Colombo, which had absolutely no history of producing cricketers, didn’t have very far to go.
“I started playing on the beach,” he says. “I wasn’t far from my home; you could see it from my front porch. No-one in my family was involved with cricket, not even my older brother. My father was a mechanic and my mother worked at a bank.” Did you see any cricket when you were growing up? “No.” “What about local matches? “No.”
So how did you find out about cricket? “It was played on the beach by some grown-ups. I joined them when I was 11. Straight away, I could bowl fast. They liked to have me on the team.” Was it serious cricket? “Serious. But not like real cricket. Soft-ball cricket, with a tennis ball.”
What was your contact with real cricket? “I watched cricket on television, but the game played there was far away. They had hard balls, pads, helmets. We had bats cut out of bits of wood that we had picked up, and tennis-ball that we would shave and pichcchila,’ he searches for the English word, ‘…burn, to make them a bit harder. They went fast after you had burned them! The beach was all the cricket I played. My village would play other villages in six-a-side matches. We would play cricket 365 days of the year.” What if it rained? “We’d play”.
Giant leaves from coconut tree would be cut and placed over wooden frames to create a makeshift ‘indoor net’ and thus play was never interrupted. “School would finish at 1.30; by 2.30 we’d start playing until dark.” as a teenageR, Malinga started to build a reputation as a fast bowler around the coast from the world-renowned dive-centre Hikkaduwa to his home-town of Rathgama (pop. 6000). “I was playing six-a-side cricket and I knew I was good,” he says matter of factly.
Like many a Sri Lankan cricketer the only thing he feared was his mother, whose front porch was in viewing distance of the sands. “My mother was very strict and wanted me to not spend so much time playing cricket. What would happen is that I’d bowl an over and then go home, let my mother know I wasn’t just playing cricket and then go back to the beach and carry on playing!” (Don’t, by the way, tell his mother about his tattoos. Malinga doesn’t, until at least a week after he gets them.)
Malinga is unmissable on or off the cricket-field: there’s the straw-thatch hair, the simplicity and graciousness, and there is of course that scarecrow side-arm slinger of an action. I have to ask him the question, and he’s already answered it many times, if not in English. Why the side-arm sling? He answers patiently, and in his answer you can see that he was already thinking about his game. “In soft-ball cricket, to minimize the runs the safest ball is the yorker into the sand. So I want to bowl six balls of yorkers. This was always my action. I see this side-action as making it easy to bowl yorkers. No-one ever said to change it. I think with this action it is very easy to put the ball in the right place. If I bowl very straight I could take wickets.”
And then he grins. “I could always bowl quick – but not always straight.” His mother of course wanted him to study. Well followed as it was (imagine village-green cricket in England), cricket on the beach was never going to offer a living. And not even Lasith Malinga in his wildest dreams ever thought he could be a national cricketer.
A whizz at maths as a youngster, a career in a bank beckoned after A-Levels. But he never got a chance to take those exams. He got spotted first. “After O-Levels I went to Vidya Local College for A-Levels and I played a soft-ball match for them where the umpire was from Mahinda College [a cricket-playing school in Galle, a 20-30 minute drive from Rathgama] and he said I should play for them.”
Malinga’s mother let him go to this school with a strong academic reputation not knowing, that they had their own cricket field. He took 14 wickets that first time he ever bowled with a real cricket ball. He was on his way. He was a bowling star at Mahinda and was sent to Colombo in selection trials to take on the touring Under-19 Pakistan team. “Five of us went. I took three wickets in three overs. After the match the officials called me in to the pavilion. I thought that was it, I was going to play for Sri Lanka. But they sat me down and sent me home.” Current internationals, all-rounder Farveez Maharoof and opening bat Upul Tharanga, were in that year’s Sri Lankan U-19 team, but of the bowlers selected ahead of Malinga that day in August 2000 not too much has been heard since. “If I took three in three, better than anyone, and I’m not in the team then I think maybe I don’t have a future. No problem. I go home,” he shrugs.
There’s been a sing-song lilt to his voice; it’s slower and more measured now. It obviously still hurts. Malinga uses Sinhalese – and we use our translator – to make things absolutely clear. He was very disappointed to go back to Galle. He still doesn’t know why he didn’t get picked. Either it was his youth, his strangeness, his small-town-ness (no one from Galle made it at those national trials) or the fact he just wasn’t the right sort. He was what he was; he couldn’t change. “I was fast but still not accurate. Some balls yorker, some balls wide, some balls ‘head’. No one liked to face me and I did break one batsman’s finger.” The smile comes back now, but it’s not one of evil glee, more of pride and sheepishness. “Waqar Younis was my hero. I wanted to bowl like him.” I tell him Waqar at his peak also broke fingers and toes. “Waqar was a great bowler, I wanted my yorkers to be like his.”
Malinga doesn’t yet quite have the venom of Waqar but you only have to YouTube Malinga and Waqar to notice the uncanny similarities in action: both run through the crease, and put a tremendous amount of shoulder into their deliveries, almost throwing themselves off their feet. Waqar’s arm was never the highest, particularly after his 1992 back injury, but Malinga’s of course is pretty horizontal, a topspun forehand at point of release. Didn’t anybody ever try to change his action, make the arm higher? “They tried, I tried, but it just didn’t work. I was always better bowling like this.” He raises his arm to the side, as if signaling a no-ball. Another year of school cricket followed, terrorising Galle’s batsmen until former Sri Lankan fast bowler Champaka Ramanayake who was a player-coach at Galle Cricket Club took a punt on Malinga. When I spoke to Ramanayake in Kuala Lumpur last year, he said, “I spotted Malinga. Worked with him. Got him performing to his potential.”
In his first first-class match against Colombo CC, as an 18-year old Malinga took eight wickets. He was back on track. Rumesh Ratnayake was in charge of Sri Lanka’s pacemen at the time and tells me, “A lot of people claim credit for Lasith now but the thing is he did it all by himself. I just said to him that if he was stronger he would be more balanced and not bowl so many wides. He was quick. He just needed to be more reliable.” In the year he worked with Malinga before moving on to coach countries such as China for the Asian Cricket Council, Rumesh says “Lasith put on five kilos. He worked hard.” And he kept at it. “I was 52 kg when I started training in the national camp. Now I’m 72kg,” says Malinga. All muscle? “All muscle.”
With that muscle has come grace. At 5 ft 9, he’s not tall for a modern fast bowler, which makes his 85mph-plus stock deliveries all the more impressive. Plus, yorkers are effort-balls. “I’m happy to bowl six an over. I know that I can. But sometimes a knee-high full-toss works also. My strength is that I can put the ball where I want to.” He’s particularly dangerous with the older ball, and one feels that a wicket in his opening spell is actually a bonus. “Swing comes after 20 overs…”
He can get carted at the start of an innings, as we saw in the World Cup final and also in that famous match against South Africa earlier in the competition until he came back with four in four at the death and was a whisker away from bowling Sri Lanka to victory [see box, page 38]. That one performance in his 32nd ODI finally laid to rest any doubts that he was little more than an oddity. Suddenly finding he’s good enough to excel at the highest level, he wants to make sure he does nothing to compromise his standing. “Lasith’s handled his fame very well – especially all the female attention,” Sri Lanka skipper Mahela Jayawardene tells me. Does Malinga have a girlfriend? Of course. How many? “Just one,” Malinga says. And I’m inclined to believe him.
Tom Moody’s tenure as Sri Lanka coach from 2005/07 was significant for the way it re-focused the talents of Jayawardene, Sangakarra, Tharanga, Dilshan and Maharoof, players who were at risk into falling into comfort zones. The team achieved a level of consistency and class. What about Malinga? “Tom Moody had no effect on me,” Malinga says. None? “No. I knew what I had to do to stay in the team. Vaasy’s a great help on training. He’s had a long career and I can do the same.”
Malinga doesn’t even ride his motorbikes anymore, not wanting to risk injury. Yamaha are about to present him with a brand new motorbike, though, and his toothy grin has secured him a Sri Lankan toothpaste endorsement. He’s also taken on social and environmental concerns with a ‘Garments Without Guilt’ campaign for Brandix, Sri Lanka’s largest clothing exporter. Sure, the money’s coming in but he’s not doing or being anything other than himself. He’s been working on his own hair creations since he was 17, has been smiling for even longer than that and it didn’t need a tsunami to hit Rathgama to tell him that life can be washed away any second. He is who he is.
The last year has seen him climb the world rankings – he’s now ranked 9 in ODIs, though still lagging at 27 in Tests – and go further round the speed-dial: “I bowled 148 kilometres [92.5 mph] at Trent Bridge last year,” he says with pride. His best ball ever was “a yorker to bowl Dhoni in Jaipur” in February (even though it was a no-ball). He was a force in the Champions Trophy (11 wickets at 18.18) and also the World Cup (18 wickets at 15.77). Plus he’s proving to be a decent bat down the order. England have never found him easy in one-dayers and at times Australia’s batsmen have been under the cosh too. Yorkers aren’t dependent on the states of pitches or cloud cover for success. Waqar Younis in his yorker-laden pomp could have played anywhere and still taken wickets. Malinga’s the same. He is most dangerous with the ball showing a little wear, but able to get a wicket at any time.
He has captured hearts and minds around the world and unlike Jayasuriya or Muralitharan that’s not just down to his on-the-park cricketing magic. “I see people in grounds with my hair, either in wigs or real, not just at home. There were so many in the West Indies and South Africa! It’s really good to see.” His figures after three years in international cricket aren’t outstanding (he averages 24 in ODIs and 30 in Tests) but he is taking wickets (or at least the ones that Murali’s big hauls and Vaas’s swag allow him to) and he is a brilliant foil for the others. He’s not the only reason Sri Lanka are winning; their batsmen and bowlers have been enjoying a golden period in recent years. But it’s a happy team and Malinga is a major component of that. In reality, his career is only just starting. “I’m living my dream which I didn’t even know I could dream before.” Good as he is, he is going to get better.
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