Big farewell planned for Jayawardene

Angelo Mathews, the Sri Lanka captain, said his side wanted to give Mahela Jayawardene a fitting farewell to Test cricket by winning his remaining four matches.

Jayawardene had announced on Monday that he would retire from the longest format of the game in August, after the two-Test rubber against South Africa followed by two matches against Pakistan.

Jayawardene, 37, will only be available for One-Day Internationals, having also retired from Twenty20 Internationals cricket in April this year.

“We need a player like him in the team, but he (Jayawardene) has decided to say goodbye,” said Mathews at a on Tuesday (July 15), the eve of Sri Lanka’s first Test against South Africa. “If we can send him off by winning all four Tests it will be great.”

Jayawardene has been one of the batting mainstays for Sri Lanka since his debut against India in 1997 and has amassed 11,493 runs over a career spanning 145 Tests.

With 33 hundreds and 48 fifties in his kitty, he is the joint sixth-highest run-getter in Test cricket along with teammate Kumar Sangakkara, who coincidentally has the same Test aggregate (11,493 runs) as Jayawardene.

Mathews conceded it would be tough for his team to fill Jayawardene’s shoes.

“He’s been tremendous for us in the past 15 years or so, scoring so many runs. His contribution to the team has been unbelievable. So it’s difficult to replace him,” conceded Mathews. “But that is the challenge we face in the future… new players should accept this challenge and play well.”

The immediate task at hand for the home team is to get the better of South Africa, who won the recent One-Day International series 2-1 with an emphatic 82-run win in the decider last Saturday at Hambantota.

It was the first one-day series victory for South Africa on the island.

The visitors have a new skipper in Hashim Amla, who is set to become South Africa’s first non-white player to lead the side permanently as they go through a rebuilding phase after the retirements of Graeme Smith and Jacques Kallis.

Mathews said South Africa had the players who could overcome the absence of the stalwarts

“They’ve still got these very good players in the team and they are a very strong team to beat whether you play them at home or away as they showed us in the one-day series,” he said. “They are a very balanced team and we have to be at our best to beat them, it’s a huge challenge.”

The second and final Test will be played in Colombo from July 24-28.