Yes, Sangakkara has faced a
Yes, Sangakkara has faced a barrage of criticism since becoming the captain of the Sri Lankan team. In my opinion a good 80% or more of that criticism directed towards Sangakkara have come from those who know next to nothing about the game of cricket and those who at the same time obviously seem to have some personal problem with their ill advised perception of Kumar Sangakkara the person.

As Sangakkara himself alluded to in a recent interview he simply does not give a damn about the bad press that he gets or what his detractors have to say. Despite the rubbish written in the media about him, Sangakkara still handles the media with respect and is always forthright with how he wants the team to move forward through this rather stormy transitionary period that the Sri Lankan team is going through.

This is right attitude because at the end of the day great captains from years gone by like Imran Khan, Arjuna Ranatunga and Saurav Ganguly were hated by the press and their own fans (much like Sangakkara is today) because people had issues with their no-nonsense aggressive personality more so than any other cricketing reason as such. Imran, Arjuna and Saurav did not hit gold from day one as Captains of their respective teams. It was only after years of leading the side did they emerge as the great leaders that they eventually went on to become. To have expected miracles from Sangakkara who is leading a Sri Lankan team in transition with their perennial match winners of the years gone by like Murali, Vass and Jayasuriya well and truly past the post and no longer the match winning force that they once were is nothing short of utter foolishness.

As for the Kings XI side, their bad performance this season had nothing to do with Sangakkara’s leadership as is being projected by some of his desperate detractors in Sri Lanka who seem to have found strange bedfellows in India to have a go at a common enemy.
Yuvraj Singh was quite clearly deliberately underperforming after losing the captaincy which was nauseating to watch. The contribution of the Indian contingent in the Kings XI team (which is vital for the success of a franchise as 7 of the 11 players are in fact Indians) was a disaster to say the least.

Coach Tom Moody was still busy with Western Australia when the Kings XI stepped out on the field to play their first match of the season leaving no room whatsoever to plan and strategise with the Captain and the team in the days leading up to the beginning of the tournament. The bowling (with the exception of Piyush Chawla) was shambolic to put it mildly. Irfan Pathan who picked up 15 wickets at an extremely impressive econ rate of 6.6 in the first season got worse and worse with every season. In 2009 his econ rate had shot up to nearly 9 and in 2010 it was past 9. Brett Lee who Sangakkara was looking to for that impact performance with the ball failed to pick up a single wicket in the matches that he played. The fielding was abysmal 90% of the time. The team was plagued by pre-season injuries to many of its key players as well.

When so much goes against you in a fast paced tournament like the IPL where momentum is everything there is little that one can do to turn the tide. If Sangakkara was a failure as a Captain, then India’s greatest ever Captain Saurav Ganguly was nothing short of a colossal failure in the IPL as a Captain because despite having a far better talent pool at his disposal (foreign and local) like Chris Gayle, Brendon McCullum, David Hussey, Ricky Ponting, Brad Hodge, Shane Bond, Angelo Mathews, Umar Gul, Ajantha Mendis, Manoj Tiwary, Ishant Sharma, Ashok Dinda, Laxmi Ratan Shukla, Murali Karthik and many, many more, Ganguly still was unable to get his team into the knock out stages of the IPL even once.

The example of how Kings XI Punjab reached the SF stage in the first season and comparing that to their performance this season is ridiculous as they reached the semis in 2008 on the back of the phenomenal efforts of one man; Shaun Marsh who ran up an unprecedented 616 runs in just 11 innings and in the process managed to win 5 of those 10 matches won by Kings XI that season on his own. It was that freakish effort by Marsh that single-handedly put the Kings XI side into the SF that year and it was not a true reflection of how good the team was.

At the end Kumar Sangakkara, the Kings XI Punjab’s most consistent performer rather fittingly became the first and only Kings XI batsman (as at the end of IPL 3) to go past 1,000 runs in the IPL. He is also only the 8th batsman in the IPL to have scored 1,000 runs or more and just the 4th foreign player after Gilchrist, Hayden and Kallis to do so.

Sangakkara ended his 3rd IPL season with the Kings XI team having scored a total of 1009 runs in just 34 innings which was inclusive of 8 fifties, with 5 of them being match winning efforts. Incidentally Sangakkara’s 8 fifties are just two short of the man who has scored the most number of fifties in the IPL, that man being Kallis with 10 fifties.

In comparison, Kings XI Punjab’s ‘Icon’ player the million dollar local boy Yuvraj Singh suppose to be the most destructive hitter of the cricket ball ended his 3rd season with the team having scored a total of 894 runs from 42 innings which was inclusive of just 3 fifties, all of them coming in a losing cause.

Sangakkara’s pal and Sri Lankan team-mate Mahela Jayawardena ended his 3rd season with the Kings XI team having scored a total of 837 runs from 35 innings with 1 hundred and 2 fifties. The hundred and one of those fifties were match winning efforts by Jayawardena.