There was no indication early on that 2014 would turn out to be such a roaring tornado of a year for Sri Lanka's men, though it did start strangely.
Sri Lanka and Pakistan began a Test on the last day of 2013, and played it into the fourth day of 2014, a game that turned out to be a staid draw in the end. But upon this first match of the calendar year (there is some debate on which year this game belongs to) Angelo Mathews made sure to write his name. Without his 91 in the first innings, Sri Lanka would have been skittled for far less than their eventual 204. Without his 157 not out in the second innings, his team would have struggled to keep the opposition at bay.
There was a lot going on at the time. The previous year, Mathews had been made captain of the Test and ODI teams at age 25, which at the time was unusually young for a Sri Lanka leader. The board, additionally, was in its brashest era. Sri Lanka Cricket was backed by a government that at the time controlled practically everything on the island, which in turn empowered SLC to fight battles on two important fronts - against the Big Three, who made their first brazen attempt to control the global game in the first quarter of 2014, as well as against the top men's players, whom the board felt were too highly-paid while the SLC was trying to claw its way back from enormous debt.
The men's schedule was packed as well. There was an Asia Cup coming up, a full away tour to Bangladesh, Test tours away to England and Pakistan (UAE), and late in the year, an away series in New Zealand. At home, there were Tests against South Africa and Pakistan, plus Mahela Jayawardene's Test retirement. If you add to this the intolerable weight of having made it to four ICC tournament finals since 2007 and always having been runners up, there was clearly a lot of pressure on the main event of 2014 - the T20 World Cup.
The team's response to all of this was to be electric and unmissable right through those 12 months. And within that team, there was no one as electric, or as unmissable, as Mathews, across almost all fronts. He was, that year, as adept at taking new-ball wickets in T20Is and ODIs, as stonewalling when the team faced a major Test deficit, as crashing boundaries in big knockouts, as prowling the covers and ranging the boundaries, as marshalling the tail, as rebuilding after a collapse, as sneaking red-ball wickets in crucial passages. Because he was the main captain, Mathews would also find himself at the centre of various controversies, including a 'Mankading' dismissal in England.
In the Test at Lord's Kumar Sangakkara deservedly got the headlines for his determined entry into the honours board in what would be his final Test there. But Mathews' 102 in the first innings, and 90-ball 18 in the second, were vital to pushing that match so deep that Sri Lanka were able to save it by the skin of their teeth. In the T20 World Cup, Rangana Herath and the frontline quicks dominated the middle and death overs. But Mathews had often set the stage for them with his miserly early spells. In the semi-final against West Indies, his 40 off 23 was Sri Lanka's best. In the final, he claimed figures of 1 for 25 off four overs.
In a home Test series against South Africa, Mathews didn't get out for any fewer than 63, showcasing remarkable consistency. Then in the following match, against Pakistan, he pushed himself up the order and began hooking manically into the stands as Sri Lanka chased a Test victory in the dying moments of the fifth day, a raucous crowd thronging Galle's fort ramparts as well as the grass banks in the stadium. Mathews hit the winning run just as the heavens unleashed a torrent.
"He was just one of the best cricketers that fit any situation," Sangakkara says about Angelo Mathews. Sangakkara, by the way, was having no-less epic a year. But as exceptional as Sangakkara was with the bat and the gloves, no one was firing on as many cylinders as Mathews.
"He never went in and read the situation wrong," Sangakkara says. "For someone to instinctively do that at such a young age was phenomenal. Everyone talks about Michael Bevan and these other late order batters who were so good, but Angie was also exceptional in that - the way he batted with the tail, the way he attacked and cleared the boundary with such clarity. He seemed to have an answer to every match situation."
His greatest moment in Tests came in Headingley that year, when his 4 for 16 with the ball restricted England to a lead of only 108 when they'd been headed for much more, before his bruising 160 in the second innings - which featured a 149-run partnership for the eighth wicket with Herath, turned the match on its head. So often in this stretch of Mathews' career, tailenders would observably bat with more responsibility if he was the batter at the other end, like office workers who would quit chit-chatting, straighten their ties, and get back to the desk when the boss walked in. In that second innings at Headingley, Mathews had thrown his bat in anger when Dhammika Prasad (who could bat a bit) squandered his wicket first ball. So desperate was Prasad to redeem himself, that he came out and produced the bowling performance of his career, to help Sri Lanka win that game, or so the story goes.
There will always be the disappointment that Mathews didn't keep this up. Why wasn't he roughly this good for so many more years? Why does he now average less than 45 with the bat? Why has he not strode his way to 10,000 Test runs? There is the obvious structural difference post-2015, which is that Sangakkara, Mahela Jayawardene, and Tillakaratne Dilshan, whose excellence had created space for the young Mathews, retired and left a young team to its own devices. Where the senior batters had once cleared the dancefloor on which Mathews busted his moves, after 2015 so many situations into which Mathews arrived felt like a crisis.
There is also the sense that he flew a little too close to the sun. Between 2010 and 2015, no one played more international cricket. He wishes he'd clocked this workload at the time, but then asks when he would possibly have had the time to take a step back and adjust? In 2014, he was a leading figure of one of the greatest Sri Lanka sides ever assembled, desperate to finally win the silverware to reflect that greatness. Within six months in 2014, Sri Lanka won an Asia Cup, a T20 World Cup, a Test series in England, and a home series against Pakistan. Mathews was instrumental to every one of those victories.
That Mathews was coming in lower down, bred the kind of trophy-winning aggression even the top order displayed. "It gave me huge confidence knowing that Angie was there, because you know you're in absolutely in good hands," Sangakkara says. "It gives you a lot of freedom to bat, and up your tempo, or reverse pressure and be a little more aggressive. You knew you had this exceptional batter to come."
There are other exceptional Mathews moments. His captaining of the 3-0 home whitewash of Australia is an obvious. Batting all day with Kusal Mendis to save a Test match at the Basin Reserve in 2018 is another.
But even without any of that, Mathews' 2014 was enough. This was a year in which Sri Lanka carved a glorious arc through world cricket, stirring controversy sometimes with their own board, sometimes with the opposition, enrapturing their fans for months on end. In addition to the great batters already mentioned, the likes of Lasith Malinga and Herath have also had their legacies partially defined by the trophies won through this stretch.
All those superstars needed 2014's wins to provide the late validation their great careers deserved. All those superstars needed every bit of Angelo Mathews they got that year.