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Jayawardene to lead MCC against Nepal
Former Sri Lankan captain and legend Mahela Jayawardene will lead Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in a Twenty20 Triangular Cricket Tournament against Nepal and the Netherlands at the Lord’s Cricket Ground, it was announced on Wednesday.Former Sri Lankan captain and legend Mahela Jayawardene will lead Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in a Twenty20 Triangular Cricket Tournament against Nepal and the Netherlands at the Lord’s Cricket Ground, it was announced on Wednesday.
The one-day Twenty20 event is scheduled for July 29 as Nepal will relive their memories at the home of cricket having previously visited there on July 19 and defeated MCC by 41 runs in a 50-over clash. That one-day match was organised by the MCC, which governs the rules of the game, to mark the 200-year relation between Nepal and United Kingdom.
After the triangular tournament at the Lord’s, Nepal will then leave for the Netherlands for their first ever One Day International (ODI) Series to be played against the Dutch on August 1 and 3. Nepal had earned the coveted ODI status after finishing eighth in the ICC World Cup Qualifiers held in Zimbabwe in March this year.
Nepal will play one match each against the Netherlands and MCC at the Lord’s on July 29. “MCC has also announced that three Scotland players—Dylan Budge, Alasdair Evans and Mark Watt—will also feature in its squad,” a statement in the official website of the Lord’s read. MCC are yet to announce their full squad.
Jayawardene, regarded as one of Sri Lanka’s finest-ever players, is in the top three of his country’s all-time leading run-scorers in all three formats of the game, and his name appears twice on the Honours Board in the visitors’ dressing room at Lord’s, for centuries against England in 2002 and 2006. He became an Honorary Life Member of MCC in 2015.
He made almost 12,000 runs in his 149 Test matches, averaging 49.84, as well as 12,650 runs in One-Day Internationals, averaging 33.37 across 448 matches. He also played 55 Twenty20 Internationals, scoring 1,493 runs. In all, he made 54 centuries for his country across the three formats. Jayawardene also has the experience of playing domestic T20 in England with Somerset and Sussex.