Jacques Rudolph admitted Glamorgan had no answer to the brilliance of Kumar Sangakkara as the county suffered a first defeat in the Royal London One-Day Cup.
The Glamorgan captain was on the losing side in Sunday’s game against Surrey, the second of the competition for his team who had begun with victory over Gloucestershire.
Sangakkara again showed that age is no limit as the Sri Lankan legend made an unbeaten 81 to continue his stellar run of form and ease Surrey to an eight-wicket win, with five overs to spare.
Having bowled Glamorgan out for 239, Surrey’s task was made all the more difficult in Cardiff when rain reduced the target to 182 from 29 overs.
Sangakkara came to the crease at 1-21 in the fourth over and was there at the end, having stroked a classy 81 not out from 74 balls in conjunction with the more aggressive Mark Stoneman (74 from 48) as the visitors easily proved up to the revised challenge.
Rudolph said: “A shortened game is always in favour of the team batting second, but we have to reflect on how we bowled – it wasn’t through a lack of effort, but Sangakkara is a class batsman and he played another brilliantly mature innings.
“It was a difficult one for us, with quite a lot of weather round we knew it was going to be a shortened game somehow, but you can’t guess that.
“From the start we were under pressure with the bat, Colin (Ingram) and I got a partnership going then unfortunately I got out and we could never get in a position to gather momentum.”
Sangakkara, 39 peeled off another match-winning knock for Surrey and has now passed 19,000 List A runs in the process
He has now played six innings across the first-class and 50-over formats for Surrey this season and has piled on 471 runs at an average of 94.2, including a pair of consecutive hundreds in the County Championship.
The left-hander passed 19,000 List A runs during the innings, becoming just the fourth batsman to reach the landmark after Graham Gooch (22,211), Graeme Hick (22,059) and Sachin Tendulkar (21,999).
Surrey 183 for 2 (Sangakkara 81*, Stoneman 74) beat Glamorgan 239 (Ingram 72, Rudolph 57, Dernbach 3-30, S Curran 3-51) by eight wickets (DLS method).