Sri Lanka's 2011 World Cup Run to the Final

Sri Lanka reached the 2011 World Cup final having lost only one match, batting first on a Mumbai evening against the host nation, with Mahela Jayawardene making a hundred that most people who watched it still rate as the best innings played in a losing World Cup final. They lost by six wickets. Within three days the captain, the vice-captain and the chairman of selectors had all resigned.

That sequence — a strong campaign, a good final, and an aftermath that consumed most of the senior structure of Sri Lankan cricket — is why 2011 sits awkwardly in the national memory in a way that 1996 does not. It was the second consecutive World Cup final Sri Lanka had lost, and the second in which they had made a competitive total and been beaten by a better chase.

The tournament was co-hosted by India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, with fourteen teams in two groups of seven and the leading four from each going into quarter-finals. Kumar Sangakkara captained. It was the last World Cup of Muttiah Muralitharan's career, and he knew it going in.

Group A: one defeat and one washout

Sri Lanka finished second in Group A with four wins, one defeat and one no-result.

Opponent	Result
Canada	Won by 210 runs
Pakistan	Lost by 11 runs
Kenya	Won by nine wickets
Australia	No result
Zimbabwe	Won by 139 runs

The defeat by Pakistan was the only one Sri Lanka suffered in the whole tournament and it cost them top place in the group. The Australia match, in Colombo, was washed out. Neither result had much bearing on the shape of the campaign: Sri Lanka went through comfortably and, as co-hosts, played the bulk of their cricket in front of home crowds at the R Premadasa Stadium.

The one-sided group results are worth a caveat. Two of the four wins were against Canada and Kenya, associate sides who were in the tournament under a format that has since been narrowed, and a 210-run margin against Canada tells you very little. The matches that mattered in Group A were Pakistan, Australia and Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka won one of those three outright, lost one and had one abandoned. A team can top-load a campaign against weaker opposition and arrive at the knockouts undertested, and there is a reasonable argument that this is exactly what happened.

Malinga, again

In the group match against Kenya, Lasith Malinga took a hat-trick. It was his second in a World Cup — he had taken four wickets in four balls against South Africa in the 2007 tournament, the first time that had been done in a one-day international — and it made him the first bowler to take two World Cup hat-tricks. Nobody else has done it since.

Malinga's action, his round-arm slinging release and his yorker were by then the single most distinctive thing about Sri Lankan bowling, and the wider story of how the island produced fast bowlers of that kind is in Sri Lanka's fast bowling evolution. His career figures are in the player profile.

Dilshan's tournament

Tillakaratne Dilshan finished as the leading run-scorer of the 2011 World Cup with 500 runs across nine innings, including two hundreds and two fifties. He was named in the team of the tournament by both the ICC and by ESPNcricinfo.

His best innings of the tournament came against Zimbabwe at Pallekele, where he made 144 and Upul Tharanga 133, and their opening stand of 282 remains the highest first-wicket partnership in World Cup history.

Dilshan had begun his career as a middle-order batter and moved up to open, which turned out to be the making of him. He was also, in that period, the most inventive batter in the world against spin in the middle overs, and the shot he devised — playing the ball over his own head from a crouch — remains named after him in the coaching manuals.

Colombo: England beaten without a wicket falling

The quarter-final against England in Colombo was the most complete performance of the campaign. England were restricted to a total Sri Lanka never looked likely to miss, and then Dilshan and Upul Tharanga both made hundreds and knocked the runs off with the opening partnership unbroken.

A ten-wicket win in a World Cup quarter-final, at home, over a side that had tied a memorable group match with India, told Sri Lanka a good deal about their own top order. The problem, which nobody could see at the time, was that it also confirmed a batting plan that depended heavily on two openers getting in.

What co-hosting cost

The 2011 tournament left Sri Lanka with two new international grounds and a bill that is still argued about.

Pallekele International Cricket Stadium, about fifteen kilometres east of Kandy, opened in November 2009 and became the country's 104th-and-newest Test venue in December 2010, in time to be one of Sri Lanka's World Cup grounds. It has held up: it staged the Zimbabwe match in this campaign, it has hosted Tests, one-day internationals and Twenty20 internationals since, and it was allocated seven matches at the 2026 Twenty20 World Cup. A full guide is in the page on Pallekele Stadium.

The Mahinda Rajapaksa International Cricket Stadium at Sooriyawewa in the Hambantota district has not. Built in 2009 for the tournament with a capacity of around thirty-five thousand, it staged two World Cup matches in February 2011, three matches at the 2012 World Twenty20 and the first edition of the Lanka Premier League, and very little else. By 2016 official inspections found the walls, carpets, furniture and fittings in serious disrepair. It has been hired out for wedding receptions to generate revenue, and a finance minister accused the previous administration of concealing what it had actually cost to build. In Sri Lanka it is routinely described as a white elephant, and the description is hard to argue with.

The point is not that the tournament was a mistake. Co-hosting brought fixtures, revenue and a permanent upgrade at Pallekele. But the ledger for 2011 includes a stadium in a rural district that has hosted a handful of international matches in fifteen years, and any honest account of the campaign has to carry it.

The semi-final, and Muralitharan's last night in Colombo

Sri Lanka beat New Zealand in the first semi-final, again in Colombo, to reach a second consecutive World Cup final.

It was Muralitharan's last one-day international on Sri Lankan soil, and at the end of it he was carried around the ground on his teammates' shoulders. He was 38, had already retired from Test cricket the previous summer, and was carrying an injury that would limit what he could do in the final three days later. His record and the argument that surrounded his action for most of his career are in the player profile.

The emotional weight of that evening is part of why the selection decision that followed was received the way it was.

Four changes for a final

Sri Lanka made four changes to the side for the final.

Angelo Mathews was ruled out with a torn quadriceps, which was not a choice. The other three were. Ajantha Mendis and Rangana Herath were left out, Suraj Randiv came in as an additional off spinner, Chamara Kapugedera was added to the batting, and the seamers Nuwan Kulasekara and Thisara Perera were recalled having played earlier in the group stage. The reasoning offered was that India were more vulnerable to pace than to spin.

Changing four players in a World Cup final is unusual under any circumstances. Doing it after a semi-final win, having lost one match in six weeks, invited the criticism it received, and the decision has been argued over in Sri Lanka ever since. Whether it made a material difference is genuinely unclear: India's chase was built by Gautam Gambhir and Mahendra Singh Dhoni against seam and spin alike, and Sri Lanka's most likely route to defending 274 was probably always Muralitharan bowling fit, which was not available.

Wankhede, 2 April 2011

The toss had to be taken twice. The match referee did not hear Sangakkara's call the first time, a re-toss was held, Sangakkara won it again and chose to bat.

Jayawardene made 103 not out from 88 balls. Sangakkara made 48. Sri Lanka reached 274 for six, a total that on that ground and under those lights was defensible rather than commanding.

Malinga removed Virender Sehwag lbw on the second ball of the innings and had Sachin Tendulkar caught for 18. At 31 for two, with a crowd that had gone quiet, the final was in the balance. Gambhir then made 97, adding 83 with Virat Kohli and 109 with Dhoni, who had promoted himself up the order. Dhoni finished with 91 not out and ended the match with a straight six. India won by six wickets with ten balls to spare, then the highest successful chase in a World Cup final. Dhoni took the match award.

The fixture's longer history, in which this was one of very few genuine finals, is covered in Sri Lanka against India, and the full tournament record is in the archive for the 2011 World Cup.

The resignations, and an allegation years later

On 5 April, three days after the final, Sangakkara resigned the captaincy. His stated reason was straightforward: he would be 37 by the next World Cup, could not guarantee his own place in that side, and thought a successor should be developed while at his peak. Jayawardene, the vice-captain, and Aravinda de Silva, the chairman of selectors, resigned within days.

Six years later, in July 2017, the former captain Arjuna Ranatunga publicly alleged that the final had been fixed, and a former sports minister supported the claim. Sri Lankan police investigated and suspended the inquiry in 2020 on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence, and the ICC rejected the allegations. The episode is worth recording because it happened and because it was widely reported, not because anything was established; no finding of wrongdoing was ever made against any player.

How the captaincy passed on from that point, and what it did to the side's stability, is traced in Sri Lanka's captains, and Sangakkara's own career is in the player profile.

How the run reads now

Two things are true at once about 2011, and Sri Lankan cricket has never quite reconciled them.

The first is that it was a genuinely strong campaign by a genuinely strong side. Sri Lanka lost one match in the tournament, produced the leading run-scorer, had the most distinctive bowler in the game and reached a final at the end of a decade in which they had also reached the 2007 final and the 2009 World Twenty20 final. That is not the record of a side that got lucky.

The second is that it was the end of something. Muralitharan retired, the captain and vice-captain gave up their roles, and the side that had been the most consistent tournament team of the previous five years never assembled again in that form. Sri Lanka did win a global title three years later, at the 2014 World Twenty20, and it was largely the same senior players finishing what they had started. But the fifty-over side declined sharply after 2011 and has not returned to a World Cup final since.

Set against the campaign that made the country a cricket power in 1996, 2011 is the mirror image: better cricket over six weeks, worse result on the last day. The rest of the national picture is on the cricket in Sri Lanka hub.

Sources and method

This page rests on the official ICC tournament record and published scorecards, on contemporaneous reporting of the selection changes made before the final and of the resignations that followed it, and on the published record of the 2017 allegations and their subsequent dismissal by the Sri Lankan authorities and the ICC. Where the specific margin of a match could not be confirmed against an official record it has been described rather than stated numerically. Individual tournament aggregates are those in the ICC statistics for the competition. Nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets, and no claim of wrongdoing by any individual is made or implied.