During the Australian tour in 2016, Silva was struggling to score runs, where he was out for single-digit scores in all of his first 4 innings. The opening partnership often fell in the first few overs, where his counterpart Dimuth Karunaratne also struggled in form. In his first five innings of this series, he scored only 12 runs. During the second innings of Third test at SSC however, he scored his third century - 115 off 269 balls, giving the team a strong lead. Sri Lanka comprehensively won the match by 163 runs, to whitewash Australia for the first time.
