The 2020 Sri Lanka tour of Zimbabwe began with an extraordinary win by the Sri Lankan team. The first test match between the two teams was played at Harare Sports Club, Harare on January 19-23 of 2020. Both the teams tried hard to win the first match and start with a lead in the series. The Sri Lankan team was led by opening batsman Karunaratne while all-rounder Sean Williams was the captain of the Zimbabwe team. The team of Zimbabwe won the toss and chose to bat first. On their first innings, Zimbabwe played good and put a total of 358 runs. The opening batsmen Prince Masvaure and Kevin Kasuza both gave a brilliant start to Zimbabwe team and scored half-century 55 and 63 runs respectively. Their brilliant innings offered foundation to the team and provided with a better score at the day end.
The first order batsman Craig Ervine impressed spectators with his quality batting performance and played a beautiful inning but unfortunately left 15 runs short for a remembering century and scored 85 runs. The captain disappointed with his batting performance and got out early. Sri Lankan spin bowler Lasith Embuldeniya showed a clinical performance and took the most five wickets while fast bowler Lakmal took three wickets. The Sri Lankan batsmen started their first innings but opening batsman Fernando got out early. The captain of the team scored 32 runs but first order batsman Kusal Mendis played a beautiful 80 runs inning. The turning point of the match was the Angelo Mathews performance. The experienced player Mathews scored a double century and took the first inning score of Sri Lankan team to paramount. With unbelievable innings of Mathews Sri Lanka put a massive total of 515 runs in their first innings and took a big 157 runs lead.
On second innings Zimbabwe batsmen failed to score good runs and put only 170 runs on board. Captain Sean Williams was the top scorer with 39 runs in second innings. With this poor performance in second innings, Zimbabwe gave only a target of 14 runs to Sri Lankan team. The Sri Lankan team easily won the game by ten wickets and batsman Angelo Mathews was selected as the player of the match award for his brilliant double hundred.