Right-arm quick Suranga Lakmal parlayed his height and ability to extract bounce and swing into one of the longest, most successful fast-bowling careers in Sri Lankan cricket, enough to place him below only Chaminda Vaas on the team's all-time Test wicket-takers' list.

Good performances with Sri Lanka A fetched him a call-up into the national side in 2010. In 2011 he took eight wickets across three Tests against Australia at home. More than most seamers from the subcontinent, Lakmal's numbers improved radically overseas - he has a 15-run difference between his averages home and away. Against Pakistan in the series in the UAE in 2014, he took 12 wickets in the three Tests and followed it up with six in his next one, against Bangladesh in Chattogram. Lakmal's first five-for came against South Africa in Port Elizabeth in December 2016; he took 12 wickets in two Tests on that tour, albeit in matches Sri Lanka lost.

The theme of overseas overachiever was a long-running one: Lakmal took seven in Kolkata in 2017, five in Bridgetown later that year, five each in back-to-back matches in Christchurch and Brisbane in 2018-19, and 11 in two Tests in North Sound in 2021.

Though he made his ODI debut in 2009, he missed the World Cup that followed and was not quite a regular in the one-day side till the middle of the next decade. After a small handful of years when he played ten or more ODIs apiece, he faded out of white-ball contention while still remaining a mainstay of the Test attack.