Athula Samarasekera
Sri Lankan cricketer
Maitipage Athula Rohitha Samarasekera (born 5 August 1961) is a Sri Lankan Australian cricket coach and former cricketer. He was a hard hitting opening batsman and a medium fast bowler, who played four Tests and 39 One Day Internationals between 1983 and 1994.
Samarasekera was a member of the Sri Lankan cricket teams participated for the Cricket World Cup in 1983 and 1992.
Early years
Athula Samarasekera started his cricket career at Mahinda College, Galle, where he had his education. He captained his college cricket team at the annual Richmond–Mahinda Cricket Encounter in 1981. Then he joined the Colombo Cricket Club, where he subsequently became a permanent fixture of the team.
International career
Samarasekera made his One Day International debut at Swansea against Pakistan during the 1983 Cricket World Cup and made his Test debut 5 years later against England at the Lord's in August 1988. He scored a half century in the second innings of his first test and took three wickets in the match, though Sri Lanka went on to lose the game by 7 wickets.
Samarasekera was one of the first openers to successfully take the advantage of field restrictions by hitting air-borne shots in ODI cricket. His most memorable ODI performance came in the 1992 cricket world cup, when he scored a brisk 75 against Zimbabwe, reaching his half century in just 31 balls in the first ever successful run chase of over 300 runs in ODI history.
“Athula Samarasekera” enters the record as sri Lankan cricketer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Athula, Samarasekera and Lankan can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3531326. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1983, 1994 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Athula Samarasekera” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.