[2] Warnapura captained Sri Lanka's first Test match, and also faced the first delivery and scored the first run for his team.
[5] Malinda Warnapura, who played for the Sri Lanka national cricket team, is his nephew.
Warnapura has worked as an ICC match referee and an umpire, and was also a certified cricketing coach.
England won the match,[12] and Warnapura's 38 would remain as his highest Test individual score.
[17] During his Test career, Warnapura captained the Sri Lankan side in all four matches he played.
[21] He was given the captaincy of the team to temporarily replace Anura Tennekoon (who was injured) in his fifth match,[22] which was played against India on 16 June 1979, as part of the 1979 Cricket World Cup.
This resulted in a "rebel tour" of apartheid South Africa (which was banned from international cricket at the time).
[27] The tour was unsuccessful; Arosa Sri Lanka played 12 matches and lost 10 of them, while the other two ended in draws.
[29] He later claimed that not only financial issues but pressure from some members of the BCCSL forced them to undertake the tour, and expressed disappointment at the fact that no formal inquiry was held.
He became an administrator at the Bloomfield Club in 1991 after the end of the ban which he served for being part of Sri Lanka's Arosa tour of South Africa in 1982.
Warnapura participated as a judge in the reality show Youth With Talent telecasted by Independent Television Network in 2016–17.
[32] In October 2021, Warnapura was admitted to hospital due to a diabetes-related issue, with doctors forced to amputate his left leg.