Somachandra de Silva
Sri Lankan cricketer
Dandeniyage Somachandra de Silva (11 June 1942 – 15 December 2025), also known as D. S. de Silva, was a Sri Lankan cricketer, who played Test and One Day International cricket in the 1970s and 1980s. He was the first ODI cap for Sri Lanka, second Test cap for Sri Lanka and was part of Sri Lanka's first Test team. He bowled leg spin, and on the tour of Pakistan in 1982 he became the first Sri Lankan bowler to take five wickets in a Test innings. He was also the oldest player to lead Sri Lanka in Test cricket during a Test tour to New Zealand in 1983. He is also regarded as the longest serving spinner to have played for Sri Lanka and considered one of the finest leg spinners to have emerged from Sri Lanka.
Biography
De Silva hailed from a tiny village in Unawatuna and was initially educated at Mahinda College, Galle. Somachandra's elder brothers D. H. de Silva and D. P. de Silva were also Ceylonese first-class cricketers. Somachandra pursued his cricket career when he moved from Galle to Moratuwa as a schoolboy. He took up the sport of cricket when he studied at the Prince of Wales' College, Moratuwa.
He made his debut for Ceylon in 1966-67 and played in most Sri Lankan teams thereafter until the mid-1980s.
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This entry incorporates text from “Somachandra de Silva” 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.