1996 Cricket World Cup

Result

Player of the Match (Final)

Aravinda de Silva, Sri Lanka

Tournament format

12 teams in two groups of six, round-robin, top four per group advancing to the quarter-finals, then semi-finals and the final. Co-hosted across India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (India staged 17 venues, Pakistan 6, Sri Lanka 3), the first World Cup shared across three nations.

Full match archive

Every match of the 1996 tournament, not just the final — all 36 group-stage and semi-final matches, plus the final round-robin standings. See all 36 matches →

Final: match context

Sri Lanka won their first, and to date only, Cricket World Cup in 1996, beating Australia by 7 wickets in the final at Lahore's Gaddafi Stadium -- the first time any co-host nation had actually gone on to win the tournament, and a triumph built on an aggressive, attacking template that would go on to reshape one-day batting for the rest of the decade. Australia batted first and made 241 for 7. Mark Taylor (74) and a young Ricky Ponting (45) put on 137 for the first wicket, giving the innings a strong platform, but Sri Lanka's spin bowling -- Aravinda de Silva took 3 for 42 with the ball, in addition to what he would go on to do with the bat -- triggered a middle-order collapse from 137 for 2 to 170 for 5. A late, unbeaten 36 from Michael Bevan helped Australia recover to a total that still looked defendable on paper. Sri Lanka's reply began with early wickets -- both Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana, the pair whose blistering starts at the top of the order had defined Sri Lanka's whole campaign, fell cheaply -- but Asanka Gurusinha (65) and de Silva added 125 together to steady and then dominate the chase. De Silva's unbeaten 107 off 124 balls was the match-winning innings, and captain Arjuna Ranatunga finished the job with an unbeaten 47, guiding Sri Lanka home by 7 wickets with 22 balls to spare -- the first time a team had won a World Cup final by chasing rather than defending. The tournament was shadowed throughout by security concerns. Following the January 1996 bombing of Colombo's Central Bank by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, both Australia and West Indies refused to travel to Sri Lanka for their scheduled group matches, and the ICC awarded both fixtures to Sri Lanka by forfeit rather than force the games to be played -- neither match at the R. Premadasa Stadium ever took place. A separate controversy struck the India-Sri Lanka semi-final at Eden Gardens in Calcutta: chasing 252, India collapsed to 120 for 8, and crowd disturbances -- bottles and fruit thrown onto the outfield -- led match referee Clive Lloyd to abandon the game and award it to Sri Lanka, the first default of its kind in international cricket history. Sachin Tendulkar was the tournament's leading run-scorer with 523, Anil Kumble led the wicket-takers with 15, and Gary Kirsten's unbeaten 188 for South Africa against the United Arab Emirates stood as the individual World Cup batting record until it was finally surpassed in 2015.

Sources

• Wikipedia: 1996 Cricket World Cup
• Wikipedia: 1996 Cricket World Cup final
• ESPNcricinfo