Sri Lanka Cricket has appointed Kusal Mendis captain of the national men’s Test team, the Daily Mirror reported on Thursday afternoon — hours after Dhananjaya de Silva resigned the post.
The decision was taken by the SLC Selection Committee at a meeting held on Thursday at the board’s headquarters. Mendis’s first assignment in the role will be Sri Lanka’s upcoming two-match Test series against Pakistan.
Mendis has played 75 Tests and 343 international matches across all three formats.
The sequence, in three steps
The appointment completes a transition that ran over three days and that this newsroom reported at each stage.
On Tuesday, Hiru News reported — citing cricket sources rather than the board — that a decision had been taken to hand Mendis the Test job. That report named no date for an announcement, and Sri Lanka Cricket had said nothing.
On Thursday morning, de Silva resigned with immediate effect, telling the Selection Committee in a letter that in his genuine opinion “the mantle should go down to the next generation.” He remains available for selection as a player. No successor was named at that point.
Thursday afternoon’s announcement is the board’s own confirmation, and it closes the question the resignation left open.
He now leads in all three formats
Mendis took the ODI and T20I captaincy in May 2026 for the tour of the West Indies, at which point de Silva retained the Test job. With the Test captaincy added, Mendis leads Sri Lanka in every format.
The distinction matters because the two appointments are separate events months apart, and the earlier white-ball announcement is easily mistaken for this one. Search results for “Kusal Mendis named Sri Lanka captain” return the May tour announcement ahead of Thursday’s news.
Not reported: the Daily Mirror filing does not name a vice-captain, give the dates or venues of the Pakistan Tests, say whether the appointment is permanent or for the series only, or carry any comment from Mendis himself. No other verified newsroom had filed on the appointment at the time of writing — Hiru News, NewsFirst and the Ada Derana domain carried the resignation but not the successor — so this article rests on a single source.
