5 Sri Lankans who had forgettable debuts but went on to have remarkable Test careers

#1 Marvan Atapattu

Atapattu made his debut in 1990

Performance on debut: 0 and 0 against India, 1990

Representing his country at a young age of 20 must have been a great feeling for Atapattu, but his joy was cut short when he was out caught behind for a duck in his very first innings. Things went from bad to worse in the second innings as he was out LBW of a Kapil Dev delivery, again for zero.

He then returned two years later, but failed yet again as he scored 0 and 1. Fast forward another two years, and the right-hander got another pair in the third match for his country. Interestingly, the one run that he scored was a leg bye, but, much to the relief of the top order batsman, the umpire gave it as runs.

Test career stats

MAT	RUNS	AVG	100
90	5502	39.02	16

The classy batsman had to wait six years to score his second run in Test cricket, but what followed was an illustrious career. Atapattu scored 5502 runs in 156 innings with 16 hundreds and 6 double hundreds to his name. He also went on to captain the Lankan Test team in 18 matches, winning eight and drawing four of those.

The next time you are staring at a failure or a possible rejection, think of Attapattu.