Stats: Kumar Sangakkara's century streak in County Championship

It won’t be an overstatement to say that Kumar Sangakkara is currently the best Sri Lankan cricketer actively playing any form of the game as the retired international legend continues to pile up tons of runs playing across the globe. The left-hander has been at his prime form in this season playing a crucial role for the County side Surrey across all the three format competitions. The 39-year-old also led the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) team Jamaica Tallawahs and was among the leading run-getters.

The former Sri Lankan captain made his place in the 245-year-old first-class cricket records on the back of his form in the County Championship. With five centuries in five innings in the month of May, Sangakkara became only the 8th player in the first-class history to score five consecutive hundreds in the format. He missed out on joining the list of three players with six consecutive FC centuries as the legendary-batsman fell short of his 6th hundred in a row by just 16 runs. In the next couple of months, Sangakkara made prominent contributions in Royal One-Day Cup, NatWest T20 Blast and CPL.

He struck three centuries in the last four county innings of his career to take his centuries tally in 2017 to eight. All these eight centuries came in a space of just 11 innings. Thus Sangakkara became only the 4th player in FC history with eight tons in a space of 11 innings. Since 2000, Mark Ramprakash (10 in 2006) is the only player to score more than eight centuries in a single county season as Sangakkara shares the 2nd spot along with David Fulton and Marcus Trescothick.

Players with eight centuries in a space of 11 first-class innings:

Most hundreds for a player in a single County Championship season:

Since his International retirement in 2015, Sangakkara has scored 14 centuries in just 55 innings in the County Championship. In this period, no other batsman has managed to score more than 11 tons in this competition. In these three County seasons, the Sri Lankan has scored 3353 runs at an impressive average of 63.26 for Surrey.

(Stats as on September 22, 2017)