Nuwan Zoysa is a left-arm seam bowler. In only his eighth Test, Zoysa became one of the few players in history to take a hat-trick off his first over of the match. He achieved this against Zimbabwe at Harare in November 1999. In his first three balls of the Test match he took the wickets of Trevor Gripper, Murray Goodwin and Neil Johnson.

Zoysa made his first class debut in 1996/97 and during his first season he took his career best figures of 7 for 58, playing for Sinhalese Sports Club. He made his Test debut soon after in Dunedin against New Zealand. He has gone on to take over 100 ODI wickets for Sri Lanka, the ninth to have achieved the milestone.

An aggressive lower order batsman, Zoysa once won an ODI game against Australia with an unbeaten 47.