The Sri Lankan Men’s National Cricket Team under the leadership of Dhananjaya De Silva secured a historic and comfortable eight-wicket victory over Ollie Pope-led England in the third & final test-match of the three-match test series.
Despite the Three Lions securing a series win by a margin of 2-1 in the first two encounters, the island nation’s victory in the final encounter is really special as this is their first win in the longest format of the game against the European nation in a decade.
In the final test match of the series, the Ollie Pope-led team set a decent target of 219 runs, which the visitors chased down easily.
Opener Pathum Nissanka played a crucial role, playing an unbeaten knock of 127 runs in the second inning to help his side cross the line and secure a historic-win.
The island nation’s victory against the Three Lions in the third test match has created a lot of changes in the overall standings of ICC’s World Test Championship (WTC) 2023-25 cycle, pushing them up in the standings.
England’s defeat on the other hand has led them to falling down in the standings.
The Sri Lankans have jumped to the fifth position in the WTC 2023-25 points table, while the Three Lions have dropped down to sixth place.
The Indian Cricket Team continues to maintain the first position in the WTC points table with a PCT of 68.52 next to their name, followed by the Aussies in the second position with a PCT of 62.05 and New Zealand at the third place with 50 PCT.
Bangladesh moved to the fourth spot in the points table after whitewashing Pakistan 2-0 in the recently concluded test-series.
Sri Lanka’s PCT has improved a lot from 33.33 to 42.85, which helped them make a jump of two spots from the seventh to the fifth position.
With consecutive wins against Sri Lanka in the first two matches, the Britishers had moved to fifth place. However, their defeat in the third and final test meant that their PCT took a hit and dropped to 42.18, leading to a big impact on their position and it pushed them to the sixth spot.
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