Sri Lanka's 2014 World Twenty20 Title

Before 6 April 2014, Sri Lanka had lost four global finals in seven years. The 2007 World Cup final in Barbados, the 2009 World Twenty20 final at Lord's, the 2011 World Cup final in Mumbai, and — worst of all — the 2012 World Twenty20 final at their own ground in Colombo, where they were bowled out for 101 chasing 138 in front of 38,000 people.

That is the context for what happened in Mirpur. Sri Lanka chased 131 against India, won by six wickets with thirteen balls to spare, and Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene walked off having played their last Twenty20 international. It was not a great final and it did not need to be. It ended a run of near-misses that had begun to look like a national characteristic.

The four that got away

It is worth setting the four out, because the same names appear in all of them.

Final	Result
2007 World Cup, Bridgetown	Australia 281 for four in 38 overs; Sri Lanka 215 for eight in 36. Lost by 53 runs
2009 World Twenty20, Lord's	Sri Lanka 138 for six; Pakistan won by eight wickets
2011 World Cup, Mumbai	Sri Lanka 274 for six; India won by six wickets
2012 World Twenty20, Colombo	West Indies 137 for six; Sri Lanka 101 all out. Lost by 36 runs

The 2007 final was the strangest of them. Rain cut the match to 38 overs a side and then reduced Sri Lanka's innings to 36; Adam Gilchrist made 149 from 104 balls, then the highest score in a World Cup final. With three overs left the umpires took the players off for bad light and a communication failure led officials to suggest the remaining overs be played the following day, when the match had in fact already gone far enough to produce a result. Sri Lanka came back out and batted in near-darkness for nine more runs. Sanath Jayasuriya had made 63 and Kumar Sangakkara 54 in a chase that was never realistic. That campaign is covered in the 2007 World Cup run.

The side was captained by Lasith Malinga, who had not been appointed captain for the tournament, and coached by Paul Farbrace, an Englishman who left for the England job weeks later. Almost nothing about the campaign went according to plan except the result.

Bangladesh, March 2014

The 2014 World Twenty20 ran from 16 March to 6 April in Bangladesh, across Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet, and was the first edition to involve sixteen teams: a qualifying group stage followed by a Super 10 in two groups of five, then semi-finals and a final. It was also the first men's Twenty20 World Cup to use the Decision Review System throughout.

Sri Lanka arrived in form and in familiar surroundings. In March, weeks before the World Twenty20 began, they had won the Asia Cup in the same country and at the same Mirpur ground, beating Pakistan by five wickets in the final: Lahiru Thirimanne made a hundred, Jayawardene added 156 with him, and Malinga had already taken five wickets in Pakistan's innings. That was Sri Lanka's first Asia Cup in six years.

The practical value of that was considerable. They knew the pitches, they knew how much the ball would turn in the second half of an innings, they knew what the outfields did to a chase, and they had a spin attack built for exactly those conditions. Their record in the format up to that point, including the two lost finals, is set out in Sri Lanka's T20 international history.

Group 1: three wins, one Hales

Sri Lanka topped Super 10 Group 1 with three wins from four, ahead of South Africa on net run rate.

Opponent	Result
South Africa	Won by 5 runs at Chittagong
Netherlands	Won
England	Lost
New Zealand	Won

The South Africa match, on 22 March, set the tone: Sri Lanka made 165 for seven, South Africa reached 160 for eight, and the margin was five runs. Twenty20 cricket in Bangladesh in March is not a batting exhibition, and being able to defend a modest total was worth more than being able to make a large one.

The one defeat came at Chittagong on 27 March, and it was entirely the work of one player. Alex Hales made 116 not out, the first Twenty20 international century by an England batter, and added 152 with Eoin Morgan for the third wicket — then a record for that wicket in the tournament's history. Sri Lanka had made a substantial total and it was chased down anyway. There is no tactical lesson in it: sometimes an opponent plays the innings of his career.

Herath's five for three

On 31 March at Chittagong, in the match that effectively decided the group, Rangana Herath took five wickets for three runs against New Zealand.

Left-arm orthodox, no great pace, bowling on a surface that was gripping and turning square in the second innings — and New Zealand simply had no answer. Wisden later named it the Twenty20 international spell of the decade. It remains among the very best bowling analyses in the history of men's Twenty20 internationals.

Herath's importance to that side is easy to understate because he was 36, unglamorous, and spent most of his career as the successor nobody thought could follow Muttiah Muralitharan. He was in fact the most reliable Test bowler Sri Lanka had for a decade, and the tradition he belonged to is set out in Sri Lanka's spin bowling tradition.

Chandimal out, Malinga in

Dinesh Chandimal had been appointed Sri Lanka's Twenty20 captain in 2013 and led the side in the first part of the tournament. He was then suspended for a slow over rate, was carrying an injury, and did not return to the side for the rest of the competition.

Malinga took over. He had never been the obvious candidate — a fast bowler with a wholly unorthodox action, not a batter, not a natural spokesman — and he captained the side to the title. It is one of the odder captaincy stories in the history of global tournaments: a stand-in who was still standing in when the trophy was handed over. How the Sri Lankan captaincy has moved between senior players over the decades is traced in Sri Lanka's captains, and Malinga's own record is in the player profile.

The semi-final, against the holders

Sri Lanka's semi-final was against the West Indies at Mirpur — the side that had beaten them in the previous final, in Colombo, eighteen months earlier.

Sri Lanka won it. Given what had happened at the R Premadasa Stadium in October 2012, when Marlon Samuels made 78 from 56 balls and Sri Lanka collapsed to 101 all out in front of a home crowd, the identity of the semi-final opponent mattered a great deal inside the dressing room. That defeat, at home, is the one members of the side have described since as the hardest to get over.

Mirpur, 6 April

The final was played at the Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium in front of 25,416 people, after a rain delay, as a day-night match. Malinga won the toss and put India in.

India made 130 for four. Virat Kohli made 77 from 58 balls with five fours and four sixes, and was the only Indian batter who looked comfortable: Rohit Sharma made 29, Yuvraj Singh 11 from 21 balls, Ajinkya Rahane 3, and Mahendra Singh Dhoni finished on 4 not out. Herath conceded 23 from his four overs and took a wicket; Angelo Mathews and Nuwan Kulasekara took one each. India's innings is the clearest illustration of what Sri Lanka's attack was for — not to bowl a side out, but to make a good batting surface feel like a bad one for fifteen overs.

Sri Lanka lost early wickets and then Sangakkara, who had made almost nothing in the tournament to that point, made 52 not out from 35 balls. Jayawardene made 24. Thisara Perera hit 23 from 14 balls and finished it. Sri Lanka reached 134 for four in 17.5 overs and won by six wickets. Sangakkara took the match award. Kohli was player of the tournament, which is the kind of outcome that happens when the best batter in a competition is on the losing side in the final.

The fixture's longer history, and the two 2023 collapses that came later, are in Sri Lanka against India.

Two retirements on the outfield

Sangakkara and Jayawardene had both announced before the final that it would be their last Twenty20 international. Winning it was not the plan; it was the ending they had asked for and had no particular reason to expect.

Between them they had played in the 2007 World Cup final, the 2009 World Twenty20 final, the 2011 World Cup final and the 2012 World Twenty20 final, and lost all four. Jayawardene had captained in two of them. To finish with a title, in the format they were leaving, in the country where they had won the Asia Cup a month earlier, closed the account in a way very few careers manage.

Both played on in the longer formats for a while afterwards. Neither played another Twenty20 international.

The coach who left

Paul Farbrace had been Sri Lanka's head coach for a matter of months when the tournament started, having previously worked in Sri Lankan cricket as an assistant.

Within weeks of the final he had gone to England as assistant coach, a move that caused a certain amount of unhappiness in Colombo and a certain amount of amusement everywhere else: a coach who wins a World Twenty20 and leaves immediately for a job under someone else is not a common career step. The looseness of the arrangement says something about where Sri Lanka Cricket was in that period — able to assemble a title-winning side, unable to hold on to the staff around it.

What the title settled, and what it did not

It settled the question of whether the generation of Sangakkara, Jayawardene, Dilshan, Malinga and Herath would win a global trophy. They did, and the record now reads two global titles for Sri Lanka — the 1996 World Cup and this one.

It did not solve anything structural. Within two years most of that side had gone, and the decline in Sri Lankan results across all three formats after 2015 was steep and prolonged. The 2014 title is better understood as the last act of a generation than the beginning of anything, which is exactly the reverse of how 1996 functioned. The lost final of 2011 belongs to the same group of players and the same arc.

There is a reasonable argument that 2014 flatters the side slightly. It was won in conditions that suited Sri Lanka more than any other participant, over four overs' worth of a final in which the opposition made 130, with a captain who was not the appointed captain and a coach on his way out. None of that is a reason to discount the trophy — tournaments are won in the conditions that exist — but it does explain why the win produced no lasting momentum. A title won by exploiting familiar conditions with an ageing side tells you very little about what happens when the conditions change and the side breaks up, and within eighteen months both had.

The tournament record is archived under the 2014 World Twenty20, Sangakkara's career figures are in the player profile, and the wider national picture is on the cricket in Sri Lanka hub.

Sources and method

This page is built from the official ICC tournament record for the 2014 World Twenty20, the published final scorecard, and contemporaneous reporting on the change of captaincy and on the two retirements announced around the final. Where a group-stage margin could not be confirmed against an official record it has been described rather than given as a number. The ranking of Herath's analysis among Twenty20 international bowling performances moves as new figures are recorded and is therefore stated in general terms. Nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.