Ravindra Pushpakumara won’t go down as a legend in the annals of Sri Lankan cricket. He’d be lucky to get a mention. Yet, on 17 March 1996, Pushpakumara made a contribution of his own that probably meant nothing at all, yet could be classified as the best a 12th man could do.

Aravinda de Silva was in the “zone”, that secluded sweet spot batsmen aim to squeeze into when constructing every single knock. “You know the one [zone]. Where you walk in and that feeling of complete and utter control comes over you. I don’t think there was ever an innings that better encapsulates this than Aravinda’s knock in the 1996 World Cup final,” Mahela Jayawardene says of de Silva’s night in Lahore.

In the midst of this zone was thrown a 12th man, one who could potentially break the bubble de Silva, and his partner Asanka Gurusinha, had managed to create. Pushpakumara was that man, crowded with messages from the overly anxious dressing room, expected to deliver each of them word for word.

Everyone in the dressing room had something or the other to tell the batsmen in the middle and Pushpakumara, “under extreme stress” by his own admission, walked down the flight of stairs where head coach Dav Whatmore had one more message to pass on.

Whatmore’s words sounded Greek to Pushpakumara, whose English wasn’t as polished then and he just muttered that he’d pass on the message without grasping a word of what was said to him.

By the time he reached the middle, Pushpakumara was under so much stress that he forgot what he came to deliver.

“When I got to Aravinda and Gura, I completely choked. My mind was under so much stress, I didn’t remember a thing, so I just said something like, “Well played aiyya, keep going” and ran back,” he says, recalling the incident, as revealed by ESPNCricinfo.

Of course, the ordeal wasn’t done with that. Pushpakumara had to answer to everyone in the dressing room who wanted their messages to be passed on. And Pushpakumara, already under immense scrutiny and stress by then, lied. He said that he had passed on the message to anyone who came and asked him.

Yet he had never delivered any of them, instead just egging them on without adding too many more messages.

Whether it played a part or not, Sri Lanka lost only one more wicket and de Silva completed a sensational hundred to take the underdogs, Sri Lanka, to their maiden World Cup victory.