“It still feels hollow,” du Plessis said after the game in Durham. “It’s great winning, obviously, but it is very, very bittersweet, because you know that we’ve let a lot of people down and that was never the plan. So we will enjoy in the changing room. We will get together and we will enjoy the performance.

“But I think, when you go back, there will still be that hollow feeling of stuff that could have been in this tournament.”

None of Sri Lanka’s batsmen could push past 30, as a dearth of substantial partnerships hurt the side. They limped to a below-par 204, before du Plessis and Hashim Amla put the game beyond Sri Lanka by building a strong foundation, something Karunaratne admitted his own batsmen couldn’t execute.

“That is what I’m expecting from our players – to keep rotating the strike and to bat 35-40 overs and then go for the big shots,” he said. “They unfortunately couldn’t rotate the strike. That is the main thing, and they built the pressure on our side.”