Honed by the lean years, Rangana Herath prepares for final feast

Rangana Herath will retire in the realms of Test greatness, but it is determination and toil – rather than magic – that got him there

Andrew Fidel Fernando04-Nov-2018It is impossible to watch Rangana Herath bowl a difficult spell and not gain a sense of the human being. On those days – the tough ones – when he’s set a batsman up for the slider only for the opponent to have worked him out, when he’s tried the gentle floaters, the over-spinners, the round-arm darts, and none of these has come good, these are the moments that lay him bare, the sessions that expose him.He is a mongoose, rooting through the undergrowth. He turns over another rock, and drives onward, never pausing, a vision of grim determination. Great spinners are often cast as wizards, players who flicked their fingers, flexed their wrists and brought forth the magical – balls that exploded off the surface, deliveries that danced through defences, batsmen left standing there like idiots, their minds addled, their feet hexed. Herath has more wickets than all but three of the greatest, but he has never been that kind of spinner. He has lived and played in our world, rooting through the undergrowth.His success seems all the more extraordinary for having come now, in the second decade of the 21st century. This is an age of academy-drilled cricket-playing automatons, and in Sri Lanka, of frequent fast-tracking of young players into the national team, like they are being carried in on palanquins. It is no surprise that many of these young players fail abysmally when hard times come, because when have they ever known them?Herath, meanwhile, knows all about lean years. He spent a decade in the shadow of Muttiah Muralitharan, playing season after thankless season in the domestic competition, picking up short-term gigs in English leagues, part-timing at his bank job when there was no cricket to be played. What’s a wicketless session compared to all that? What’s a batsman who has just hit him against the turn? A team-mate who has dropped another catch? An umpire in a sour, not-outing mood?If he has never taken it upon himself to shoot barbs at the many powerful incompetents running cricket in the country – as virtually every other great Sri Lankan player has done – it is because he has never taken himself too seriously. Self-deprecation comes easily to him. Boasting and posturing, not at all. Make a quip, about his rotund shape, say, as everybody who has ever written about him, or spoken about him, or looked at him has done. He will chuckle as if he was in on the joke. So heartily, it’s like he is more in on it than everyone else. Few great bowlers are as forgiving of team-mates who have made fielding lapses, yet Herath will throw himself around the field for others, despite the fact his body is at least 90% torso. Another joke about his shape. Who can possibly resist?