Angelo Mathews is back.
These words don’t quite have the same ring in 2023, as they’ve had so many times over the years of his enigmatic career spread across a decade-and-a-half.
Angelo Mathews was meant to be a lot of things to Sri Lankan cricket – a leader of men, an allrounder reaching for the stars, and the vessel of expectations of a small nation with a big cricketing history once Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene walked away.
To his credit, he ticked a lot of the boxes. His leadership acumen, clear as day since his school cricket days at St. Joseph’s, came to fruition at the highest level for years. A fledgling Test career with 100-plus appearances and an average of 44 was coupled with 120 ODI wickets. Career highlights involved leading Sri Lanka to a first Test series win in England, an incredible 2014 with the bat, a T20 World Cup medal and the achievement of leading the ODI side to the quarter final of the 2015 World Cup when the fortunes of the team had dwindled.
The path to join the pantheon of Sri Lankan greats before him was laid out. But right when he had to walk the distance by taking the post-Sangakkara period and rubber-stamping it with his initials, his hamstrings began to give in.
Struggles – of seeing through a series without injury – and the reluctant sacrifice – of giving up on bowling to manage his workload – defined this frustratingly start-stop phase of his career. He kept coming back from injury layoffs, but as a lesser cricketer with the spells spent on the sidelines dimming his abilities, and his importance to the team.
Factor this: from the time of his ODI debut in 2008 to the end of Sri Lanka’s World Cup campaign in 2015, he featured in 156 of the 188 ODIs that the team played in. In the next four-year World Cup cycle, he missed more games than he did in the previous seven (37).
Mathews’s fragility slowly but surely chipped away at the possibility of superstardom, ending any hopes of putting him on the pedestal as a modern-day great all-rounder. His career instead, is a bittersweet tale of a player that promised the moon with his potential, but had his wings clipped by his own body.
Yet Sri Lanka Cricket often find themselves going back to him in times of need. Not long after he’d ended his captaincy reign of four years in 2017 did the board plead him to take it up again in the two white-ball formats. In the same year (2018), they took it off his hands after a poor Asia Cup, and even dropped him from a tour of England – possibly signalling the end of his dreams of playing in the World Cup there a year later.
Yet he was back, so Sri Lanka could lean on the wealth of his experience. He responded by being one of the standout performers of an otherwise disappointing campaign, and shone vividly in one of Sri Lanka’s greatest World Cup wins – against hosts and eventual champions in Leeds. Sri Lanka didn’t advance past the group stage, but left with the hope that Mathews could stay fit and have a late wind to his career in his 30s.
But the last four years too haven’t gone as he or anyone in Sri Lanka would’ve liked. Consistent fitness levels once again eluded him and by mid 2021, he lost his T20I spot. This cycle of the ODI World Cup has been even more cruel, giving him just 10 appearances in 57 ODIs that Sri Lanka played in this period. Mathews has taken the field in only three ODIs this year and wasn’t considered essential to Sri Lanka’s long path to the World Cup via qualifiers.
Which now brings us to Wednesday. Despite not going to Zimbabwe, a twist of fate has landed him in India with the real and out-of-the-blue opportunity of playing in his fourth ODI World Cup. Sri Lanka, with their bowling resources depleted and their backs to the wall, hit the SOS button to summon Mathews and his experience, again. What they could possibly reap from this move over the next five (or more) games is anybody’s guess. Even Mathews, who spoke of working on his fitness, controlling what he could and waiting in the wings for any opportunity, couldn’t give you a hint of how this unexpected swansong could really go.
“I’ve probably seen it all over the last 15 years,” Mathews said on the eve of the England game. Perhaps only a player like him could’ve uttered words that qualify both as a brag and a painful understatement.
