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Denagamage Praboth Mahela de Silva Jayawardene, known as Mahela Jayawardene, is a professional Sri Lankan cricketer and a former captain of the Sri Lankan cricket team. He is a specialist batsman.
Jayawardene made his Test cricket debut in 1997 and his One Day International debut the following season. In 2006 he made the highest ever score by a Sri Lankan in Test cricket, scoring 374 in the second Test of Sri Lanka's home series against South Africa. He has a test cricket average of over 50 and an One Day average in the 30s. He is the first player in the history of Sri Lankan cricket to score over 10,000 Test runs. Despite his relatively low ODI average, Jayawardene is considered to be one of the best batsmen produced by Sri Lanka and is generally held in high regard as a legend of the modern game along with team-mate Kumar Sangakkara. He is one of only three Sri Lankans—the others being Sanath Jayasuriya and Sangakkara—to have scored more than 10,000 runs in ODIs.
In 2006, Jayawardene was named by the International Cricket Council as the best international captain of the year and he was nominated in 2007 as the best Test cricket player of the year. He is also known for his fielding skills in the inner ring, with a report prepared by Cricinfo in late 2005 showing that since the 1999 Cricket World Cup, he had effected the most number of run-outs in ODI cricket of any fieldsman, with the fifth highest run-out/match ratio in ODI's. Statistics also reveal that c Jayawardene b Muralitharan is the most common bowler-fielder combination in the history of Test cricket.
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