Sri Lanka's 2007 World Cup Run to the Barbados Final

The last three overs of the 2007 World Cup final were bowled in near-total darkness, by spinners, to a Sri Lankan side that had already been beaten and knew it. Sri Lanka added nine runs. Then the umpires apologised, and two months later all five officials involved were stood down from the next global tournament. It is the strangest ending any World Cup has had, and it is the last thing that happened in a Sri Lankan campaign that had otherwise been the most convincing of the tournament outside Australia's.

Sri Lanka won eight of their eleven matches in the Caribbean in March and April 2007. They went through their group without losing, produced the most extraordinary single over of the tournament, and won a semi-final on the back of a century from their captain. They then ran into an Australian side in the middle of a third consecutive World Cup win, and into Adam Gilchrist having the best day of his life.

What Sri Lanka arrived with

The side that flew to the West Indies had a specific and unusual bowling shape. Muttiah Muralitharan and Chaminda Vaas had between them been Sri Lanka's attack for a decade — an off-spinner with a doosra and a left-arm swing bowler who worked to a fraction of a length — and around them had appeared Lasith Malinga, who bowled with a round-arm action from below shoulder height and whose stock delivery was a yorker.

No other team in the tournament had that combination of styles, and it mattered in the Caribbean, where slow low pitches suited spin and reverse swing more than they suited pace. The lineage behind Muralitharan is set out in the guide to Sri Lanka's mystery spin history, and Malinga's place in the country's changing seam tradition in the fast bowling evolution guide.

The batting was in transition. Sanath Jayasuriya was in his late thirties and still opening; Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene were both in their prime; Tillakaratne Dilshan was becoming a fixture. Jayawardene was captain, an appointment made the year before the tournament.

The group stage

Sri Lanka were drawn in Group B with India, Bangladesh and Bermuda. They won all three matches and finished top of the group with six points and a net run rate of 3.493 — a figure that tells you the wins were not close. Bangladesh went through in second place with four points and a negative net run rate, and India, who had been among the favourites, went out at the first stage.

That elimination is worth registering because of what it did to the rest of the tournament. India and Pakistan were both gone within the opening ten days, which removed most of the subcontinental audience from a competition already criticised for being too long and too expensive to attend. Sri Lanka spent the rest of the tournament as the only Asian side in it — a position that shaped how their matches against Australia and South Africa were framed. The longer history of the India fixture is covered in the guide to the Sri Lanka versus India rivalry.

The tournament Sri Lanka had to survive

The 2007 World Cup was the longest and largest yet staged: sixteen teams, 51 matches, from 13 March to 28 April. Four groups of four fed a Super Eight stage in which each qualifier played six further matches, and only then came the semi-finals.

For a side aiming at the final that meant eleven matches across six and a half weeks, spread over multiple Caribbean islands. Sustaining a bowling attack built around two thirty-something specialists through that schedule was a genuine problem, and it is part of why Muralitharan's and Vaas's workloads were managed as carefully as they were.

The tournament itself was troubled. Governments across the region had spent heavily on stadiums — Jamaica alone put more than US$100 million into World Cup infrastructure, and total stadium spending exceeded US$301 million — and the crowds and atmosphere did not match the outlay. Both India and Pakistan were eliminated in the first round. Pakistan's coach Bob Woolmer died the day after their exit; the police initially treated the death as suspicious and ordered an investigation, and eight months later an open verdict was returned and the case closed.

Sri Lanka's campaign therefore ran inside a competition that spent much of its duration being written about for reasons other than the cricket. That context matters to how the final was handled: by 28 April the officials were operating at the end of a long, badly reviewed tournament that nobody wanted to extend by a day for three overs.

Providence, 28 March: four balls

The Super Eight match against South Africa at Providence in Guyana produced the single most-replayed over of the tournament and one of the most remarkable in the history of the competition.

Chasing, South Africa were comfortable. Then Lasith Malinga bowled Shaun Pollock, had Andrew Hall caught at cover, had Jacques Kallis caught behind and bowled Makhaya Ntini — four wickets in four consecutive deliveries, spread across the ends of two overs. It was only the fifth hat-trick in World Cup history and the only instance of four in four in the tournament's records.

And Sri Lanka lost. South Africa got home by one wicket with ten balls to spare, which is a reminder that a spell like that is a spell rather than a result. Malinga was later named in ESPNcricinfo's team of the tournament, largely on the strength of those four balls and the rest of a campaign in which his yorkers were the most awkward thing any batting side faced.

The semi-final

Sri Lanka's semi-final was against New Zealand, and Jayawardene settled it with a century — the innings that made him the tournament's second-highest run-scorer behind Matthew Hayden, with one hundred and four fifties across the campaign.

The pattern of that innings was the pattern of Jayawardene's whole career: no obvious violence, a lot of placement, and a scoring rate that turned out on inspection to be quicker than it had looked. He is the only batter to have made centuries in both a World Cup semi-final and a World Cup final, the second of those coming four years later in Mumbai — a match covered in the guide to Sri Lanka's 2011 World Cup run. His technique and his place among Sri Lanka's batters are examined in the survey of Sri Lanka's great middle-order batters.

Bridgetown, 28 April

The final was played at the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados. Rain delayed the start and reduced both innings to 38 overs. Ricky Ponting won the toss and batted.

Australia made 281 for 4. Adam Gilchrist made 149 from 104 balls, the highest individual score in a World Cup final, and he made it in a shortened innings against an attack that had conceded very little all tournament. Malinga finished with two for 49 from eight overs and Dilhara Fernando with one for 74 from the same allocation.

More rain then cut Sri Lanka's innings to 36 overs and set a revised target of 269. Jayasuriya made 63 from 67 balls and Sangakkara 54 from 52, and at no point after the first ten overs was the chase realistically alive. Michael Clarke took two for 33. Sri Lanka finished on 215 for 8, beaten by 53 runs under Duckworth-Lewis.

The three overs in the dark

The ending is what the match is remembered for, and the sequence of errors is worth setting out precisely.

At the end of the 33rd over, Sri Lanka were 37 runs behind the Duckworth-Lewis par score and the light had gone. The umpires suspended play. They then announced that the remaining three overs would be played the following day, on the basis that the stoppage was for bad light rather than rain — which was wrong. Under the playing conditions, the minimum of 20 overs had been bowled, so the match was complete and Australia had won by 37 runs.

Mahela Jayawardene did not want to come back the next day for three overs of a lost match. Ponting agreed to bowl only spinners. The last three overs were played in almost complete darkness, Sri Lanka added nine runs, and the margin was recorded as 53.

Match referee Jeff Crowe described a communication breakdown among the officials, and the ICC's initial response was an apology and an assurance that nobody would lose their job. Two months later all five — on-field umpires Steve Bucknor and Aleem Dar, third umpire Rudi Koertzen, reserve umpire Billy Bowden and Crowe himself — were suspended from officiating at the 2007 World Twenty20.

What the tournament settled and what it did not

Two readings of Sri Lanka's 2007 are both defensible.

The first is that the campaign was a success: eight wins from eleven, an unbeaten group, a semi-final won by a captain's hundred, and a final reached by a country with a population smaller than several individual Indian states. Sri Lanka has reached three men's World Cup finals in the 50-over game and won one; getting to Bridgetown put the 2007 side in the same category as the 1996 team that won the tournament, described in the guide to Sri Lanka's 1996 World Cup title.

The second is that the final exposed the limit of the side. Gilchrist's innings was exceptional, but Sri Lanka's bowling — which had been the best-balanced attack in the tournament — had no answer to it at all, and the batting response never threatened the revised target even before the light went. Australia in 2007 were a genuinely better team, and the shortened match flattered rather than harmed Sri Lanka's chances.

Measure	Sri Lanka's 2007
Matches	11
Won	8
Lost	3
Group stage	Won all three, top of Group B
Semi-final	Beat New Zealand, Jayawardene century
Final	Lost to Australia by 53 runs (Duckworth-Lewis)
Tournament runs	Jayawardene second only to Matthew Hayden
Tournament award	Glenn McGrath, player of the series

The four years afterwards

The 2007 group did not break up. Jayawardene, Sangakkara, Muralitharan, Malinga and Dilshan all played the 2011 final, which Sri Lanka also lost, and several of them were still there for the 2014 T20 World Cup, which Sri Lanka won — the account of that tournament is in the guide to the 2014 T20 World Cup title. Losing two consecutive 50-over finals and then winning a global trophy at the third attempt with substantially the same players is a fairly unusual sequence, and it is the strongest argument that 2007 was a good side rather than a lucky one.

The relationship with Australia specifically was not settled by Bridgetown either; the long record of that fixture is set out in the guide to the Sri Lanka versus Australia rivalry. For how the national side and its domestic base are organised, see the guide to Sri Lanka Cricket's structure and the cricket in Sri Lanka hub.

Sources and method

Match results, dates, venues, scores, bowling figures, batting contributions and the tournament aggregates here come from published scorecards and tournament records, and from contemporary reporting of the final and its aftermath. The sequence of officiating errors at the end of the final, the ICC's initial response and the later suspension of the five officials are documented in reporting from the time.

The semi-final is described without a precise scoreline because the sources consulted confirmed the result and Jayawardene's century but not the innings totals; rather than reconstruct them, they are left out. The two competing readings in the penultimate section are editorial, offered as the two arguments that were actually made at the time rather than as a conclusion.