KANDY, APR 04,
The Indian pacers’ workload might be closely monitored by the team management but at the age of 35, Lasith Malinga has played two matches inside 12 hours — a T20 match in India and a domestic 50 over game in Sri Lanka. Malinga took 3/34 for Mumbai Indians in an Indian Premier League game against Chennai Super Kings that ended close to midnight on Wednesday.
Early morning on Thursday, Malinga was on a flight from Mumbai to Colombo and from there travelled to Kandy to play Sri Lanka’s domestic Super Four tournament, where he recorded career-best List A figures of 7 for 49, representing Galle.
Galle beat Kandy by 156 runs in the match and it was a vintage Malinga performance as the only time he got a bit of rest was when Galle batted first and scored 255.
The sleep deprived Malinga then rocked the Kandy line-up with figures of 9.5-0-49-7 with the opposition team being led by another current international Dimuth Karunaratne. Malinga, who is Sri Lanka’s ODI captain, had decided to play the provincial ODI tournament despite Sri Lanka Cricket allowing him to be available for IPL for the entire month of April.
The reason for Malinga playing the tournament is to have a closer look at some of the World Cup hopefuls.
Even though both the matches are domestic in nature, there aren’t many available instances where a player has played two matches on successive days across two countries.
