I like my champions to be imperfect, for them to have traits that confuse me, or make me a little unsure about them. Their foibles, as much as their strengths, are what keep me hooked.

In other words, I like my champions to be like Mahela Jayawardene, for whom the farewell has begun. He is quitting Tests next month. He has already left Twenty20s. Early next year, he will be gone entirely and another age of Sri Lanka cricket will be at an end.

While this is about Jayawardene, so too, is it about Kumar Sangakkara. Sangakkara is a champion as well, but he is so perfect there is an element of unreality about him, which makes him a distant fantasy.

He bats like a dream, looks as good in jeans as he does in a suit and wants to be a lawyer.

One day, he will broker world peace, or eliminate poverty. Then he will write a book about it, which will probably win a Pulitzer, and then he will talk about it, and his words will be the talk of the town forever.

The two are conjoined. In Pakistan, when talk turns to a similarly conjoined great pair, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, it ends up being a discussion about who is better (Akram, obviously).

For what it is worth, I would be with Jayawardene, always.

I think it is because his batting has a dilettantish quality. Modern batsmanship is increasingly aware of the gravity of its own function. It seems to require – as it did in Rahul Dravid or Sachin Tendulkar, and yes, Sangakkara – a great, demanding devotion.

Jayawardene’s batting has always been lighter and less burdened. He bats, it seems, because he loves batting, which is not the same as loving the end product of all batting: scoring runs.

That should not be mistaken for complacency, because an average of 50 after 145 Tests, or 33 hundreds, does not just happen during a stroll through life.

Sure, greater rigour may have helped him in places like Australia or South Africa, but that is fine. Such patterns are found in a lot of the best sportsmen.

That freedom is probably what allowed him to become such a fine opener in 50-over cricket. Suddenly, he began playing these new, modern shots, fitting them onto an essentially classical base.

Jayawardene’s move to opening was a discovery of the self, not necessarily for improvement, or efficiency. It was more like a loving renovation of an old, treasured car or bike, not done so much to improve performance as for the love of it.

It was an unexpected transformation, because he had always been a particular kind of middle-order batsman, and a joyous one to watch.

But it was his captaincy that I really loved. Few modern captains have so obviously looked like they were working something out on every ball, like how else they could delve into a batsman’s head enough to dismiss him. Michael Clarke does. Mark Taylor used to.

Jayawardene has a lovely, organic feel for the game, for the moments on which it hinges, and its psychologies.

He was unafraid to use rarely-employed field settings – hello, the leg gully – and, especially in one-day internationals, seemed to know precisely when to change bowlers, when to attack, when to hold.

In a way, his captaincy was much like his batting – so bewitching it helped make results trivial.

Take his hundred in the 2011 World Cup final, not because it proved or disproved his quality as a winning batsman, but because it was just an exquisite piece of work, to be appreciated for itself and isolated from something as piddling as a result.

He remains Sri Lanka’s winningest Test captain, alongside Sanath Jayasuriya, but that is by the by. Sometimes, the results did not seem as important as what he did on the field, always compelling and, even in defeat, laudable.

More broadly, as a leader, he expanded the definition of what we accept to be aggression, but in his own way.

He was not, and did not oversee, behaviour as ugly as that of the Australians. Neither was he as permanently confrontational as Arjuna Ranatunga, though posterity will remember that it was his leadership that revived Sri Lanka from their post-Ranatunga plateau.

But there was something in him for sure, an inner tempest that flashed before us occasionally, during his wicket celebrations, or maybe another slip catch, when one eye widened more than the other and he would look a little crazy.

In a way, it represented perfectly Sri Lanka’s modern inflection.

osamiuddin@thenational.ae