Dimuth Karunaratne: Everyday hero

In a country that produces the extraordinary every day, he was the greatest ‘normal’ cricketer.

Sri Lankan cricket culture is different from other places. There's a need for outliers, for freaks, for geniuses, for completely original players that have never existed before. It’s a part of their identity. They have had Lasith Malinga, Sanath Jayasuriya, Muttiah Muralidaran, Ajantha Mendis and Kamindu Mendis. And that's where they get their strength from. You can find people on beaches playing with rubber balls who can invent new deliveries that we've never seen before.

And through that, maybe what they haven't had is players who are just very good at cricket in a very normal kind of way. We've had the outliers, the great players like Aravinda de Silva, Chaminda Vaas, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene. But they haven't just had those workhorse type players who are really well respected and known all around the world.

But it hit me the other day, that that is what Dimuth Karunaratne is. Everyone else is this mad genius, with a monobrow, or lighting themselves on fire, cutting their ears off in Sri Lankan cricket. And Karunaratne is just the guy that makes sure that the lights stay on. He's the person who sets the table when no one asks him to. He does all the little jobs to make sure that everything's fine. No one's ever going to remember him. He's got a little clipboard. He's just checking things off as they go. He's doing what Sri Lankan cricket needs. But he's not the sort of player that Sri Lanka are used to hero-worshipping. There's nothing outlier about him. He's not a freak or a genius or an innovator or anything else. He's just a cricketer who gets the job done, over and over again.

And maybe once you think about that, you go through all the best players in Sri Lankan history. Of course there aren't as many because it only starts in the 1980s, but there's still a fair few names there. You've got a tactical genius like Arjuna Ranatunga, you've got someone like Angelo Mathews who one way or the other finds the drama and is always much more entertaining than you would ever imagine he should be. You've got someone like Tillakaratne Dilshan, who can't just play normal shots, and has to invent his own.

And it made me think, is Dimuth Karunaratne just Sri Lanka's greatest ever normal cricketer?

The interesting thing about Karunaratne is that he is an opener in an era where we just haven’t had many of them. Actually, maybe that’s the opposite way of putting it. We've actually had quite a lot of people open the batting. Cricket has just been cycling through openers because most teams find an opener who comes in, doesn't make any runs, and then disappears. Especially over the back half of Karunaratne’s career. From 2017 to now, being an opener in world cricket is a crazy job, and you have to be Steve Smith to think otherwise.

And since the start of his career, the only player who's made more runs than him in that position is David Warner. Over the last 14 years, Warner and Karunaratne have the most runs opening. Yet Warner is this huge figure and everyone talks about his strike rate and the fact that he doesn't make runs away from home. Not to mention, the sandpaper incident.

Karunaratne has almost no narratives around him. He doesn't even average 40 in Test cricket. He averages a smidge, the smallest amount, under 40 in an era where most opening batters have struggled to average 30.

But it is the second most runs of any opener since November 2012. He's got over 7000 runs in 100 Test matches with 16 Test centuries. There are only three Sri Lankans in the history of the game so far who have more than that amount of centuries. It’s a lot of runs.