Sri Lanka’s national football team beat Mauritius 3–2 in an international friendly in Saint Pierre, Mauritius, NewsFirst reported.
It was the second of two friendlies between the sides on the same tour. Newswire, which filed on the evening of 5 October, described the result as a win over higher-ranked opposition.
The win did not extend a streak
NewsFirst presented the result as Sri Lanka’s fifth consecutive international win, listing back-to-back victories over Seychelles, a win over Bhutan and a win over Chinese Taipei in AFC Asian Cup qualifying as the preceding four.
That sequence is right, but the run had already been broken — by Mauritius. The two sides met in the first friendly of the same series on 2 October, and Mauritius won it 3–0. The 3–2 result is therefore Sri Lanka’s fifth win in this run of fixtures, but not a fifth win in a row: the defeat three days earlier, to the same opponent, ended the streak NewsFirst describes as continuing.
Context
The fixtures are part of a run of friendlies the Football Federation of Sri Lanka has been arranging against opposition outside the usual regional pool, the scarcity of which FFSL president Jaswar Umar has publicly identified as a constraint on sides ranked where Sri Lanka is. Umar was elected a vice-president of the South Asian Football Federation in August.
Not reported
No Sri Lankan newsroom filing we could retrieve named the scorers, gave the attendance or the venue’s full name, or reported the first-leg defeat alongside the second-leg win. Neither Daily Mirror nor Hiru News had covered either fixture at the time of writing.
