WORTHY SRI LANKA BUOYED FOR TEST RETURN Lankans to play Boxing Day Test at the MCG

Successful limited-overs tours in Australia over the past two seasons have given Sri Lanka's players cause to be enthusiastic about their Test return next summer.

Sri Lanka won last summer's oneday series 2-1, and while it lost the deciding final of the just-completed tri-series to Australia, it nevertheless finished with a 4-3 head-to-head advantage over its host.

Mahela Jayawardene, installed as Sri Lanka's captain - for a second time - just before the tour began, said he and his teammates had achieved ''a lot of good things'' on their tour of Australia, in which they eliminated World Cup holder India from the finals.

''As a unit we played together pretty well, executed a lot of game plans,'' he said. ''A lot of the young guys would have taken a lot out of this tour. All in all it's been a successful tour, but it would have been brilliant if we had won.''

Jayawardene's predecessor, Tillakaratne Dilshan, was awarded player of the series for his tournamentbest 513 runs at an average of 51.3, which included two centuries. Sri Lanka's batsmen also occupied four of the top six scoring slots, with 22- year-old Dinesh Chandimal (419 at 52.38), complementing the dominant Jayawardene, Dilshan and Kumar Sangakkara.

''Every time we've been in Australia we've left a good impression,'' Jayawardene said. ''It's a challenging tour for us and we've risen to the occasion.''

Next summer's three-test tour is set to rectify what Jayawardene considers a major hole in his international career: never playing a Test at the MCG. Only four of the 128 Tests the 34-year-old has played have been in Australia, and were in Darwin, Cairns, Brisbane and Hobart. But next summer, Sri Lanka will be a beneficiary of South Africa's insistence on playing a home Test on Boxing Day - a prospect that delights Jayawardene.

''I've complained for the past 10 years that I've never been able to play a Test match in Melbourne or Sydney,'' he said. ''I've played everywhere else in the world but only played four Test matches, in my 14 years of international cricket, in Australia.''

In addition to the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, Sri Lanka is also likely to play a preceding Test in Hobart and also the New Year Test at the SCG.

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