Fatima Sana Did Everything, and Sri Lanka Still Went to the Final: SL Women Win the Second Semi-Final by 4 Wickets

Player of the Match awards on the losing side are usually consolation prizes handed to a batter who made a hundred in a heavy defeat. Friday night in Dubai produced a different kind. Fatima Sana walked in at 52 for 4 with her team's semi-final coming apart, batted through to 47 not out from 36 balls, and then took the new ball and had Sri Lanka 5 for 2 inside two overs. By the seventh over of the chase they were 33 for 4. Her side still lost.

That is the shape of this match and there is no way to soften it. Pakistan's captain produced the best batting innings of the night and the best bowling spell of the night — 47 not out and 4 for 38 — and watched Sri Lanka win by four wickets with eight balls remaining. Nobody else in Pakistan's top five passed 24. Nobody else in their attack took more than one wicket.

Sri Lanka, for their part, were not simply lucky to survive her. Having been reduced to 33 for 4 chasing 131, they found two batters willing to bat time rather than bat shots. Harshitha Samarawickrama made 36 from 31 and Kavisha Dilhari 33 from 33, adding 67 for the fifth wicket in the least glamorous manner available. When both fell within nine runs of one another, Sri Lanka were 109 for 6 and still needed 22. It took them ten balls.

Chasing 131 is not a difficult assignment until you are 5 for 2 in the second over, and Sri Lanka managed that. Fatima Sana had Chamari Athapaththu caught by Sadaf Shamas for 5 off the second ball of her over and Sanjana Kavindi caught by Shawaal Zulfiqar off the next. Two balls, two wickets, and the captain and the No. 3 both gone with five on the board.

Imesha Dulani played the only genuinely fluent innings of the powerplay — 24 from 21 with four fours — but by then Hasini Perera had gone for 3, caught at 31 for 3, and Dulani herself followed in the seventh over, caught behind off Umm-e-Hani. Sri Lanka were 33 for 4 after 6.2 overs. They had 98 to get and six wickets standing.

What Harshitha Samarawickrama and Kavisha Dilhari did next was the match. They took 42 balls to reach their fifty together, and their individual contributions to that milestone — 28 and 21 — tell you nobody was carrying anybody. At drinks, ten overs in, Sri Lanka were 53 for 4. On paper that looks like a chase falling apart. In practice they needed 78 from 60 with six wickets in hand, and the required rate had barely moved from where it started, because they had stopped losing wickets.

The stand was worth 67 by the time Fatima Sana returned and broke it. Samarawickrama, on 36 from 31, was caught by Shawaal Zulfiqar in the seventeenth over with the score exactly 100; five balls later Dilhari was trapped lbw by the same bowler for 33. Two of Fatima's four wickets in six deliveries, 109 for 6, and 22 still required.

That is where Nilakshika Silva and Kaushini Nuthyangana settled it, and settled it with an abruptness the rest of the night had not prepared anyone for. Silva hit three fours in her 18 not out from 10 balls. Nuthyangana, who had already taken three catches behind the stumps, hit a six in 10 not out from four. Between them, 25 unbeaten runs in ten deliveries, and Sri Lanka were in the final with eight balls unused.

Pakistan's innings can be read in one line of the scorecard. The first five batters made 2, 24, 21, 7 and 8 — 62 runs from 75 balls between them, at a strike rate of 82. Everything else Pakistan scored came from their captain and their No. 7.

Muneeba Ali was caught by Nilakshika Silva off Sugandika Kumari in the second over for 2. Shawaal Zulfiqar was the one batter in the top order who took the attack on, hitting two fours and two sixes in her 24 from 16, but she fell to Athapaththu in the fifth. Ayesha Zafar went for 7 in the seventh, Sadaf Shamas for 8 in the tenth, and at 52 for 4 after 9.5 overs Pakistan had not merely lost wickets — they had lost the shape of the innings.

Gull Feroza deserves a fairer hearing than her strike rate invites. Her 21 from 32 was not an innings anyone enjoys watching, but she was batting through a collapse on a surface where boundaries were not on offer, and she and Fatima Sana added 40 for the fifth wicket to get Pakistan out of genuine trouble. She was caught by Athapaththu off Chamudi Praboda on the last ball of the sixteenth over, with Pakistan 92 for 5.

Those last four overs are the reason this was a match at all. Fatima Sana and Tuba Hassan added 38 without being separated, taking Pakistan from 92 to 130. It converted a total that would have been beaten in fifteen overs into one Sri Lanka needed eighteen and a half to reach.

Sri Lanka's bowling deserves credit for the strangle rather than for any one spell. Athapaththu's own four overs of left-arm spin went for 24 and took two, both caught behind by Nuthyangana. Praboda matched her with 2 for 25. Kumari conceded 20 in four. Only Mithali Ayodhya went for more than a run a ball, and Nuthyangana's three catches behind the stumps were the connecting thread through all of it. Sri Lanka did not bowl a single maiden and did not need to; they simply never let a Pakistan batter other than the captain feel settled.

Sri Lanka bowled first and got what they were presumably looking for: a powerplay in which Pakistan scored 33 and lost two. The wider numbers point the same way. Across the 38.4 overs bowled in this match, only three batters who faced more than fifteen balls scored at better than a run a ball, and one of them was Pakistan's captain. Pakistan's fifty took 9.1 overs; their hundred took until the 17.3rd.

Spin did the containing at both ends. Sri Lanka's slower bowlers gave almost nothing away — Athapaththu, Praboda, Kumari and Dilhari bowled fifteen overs for 89 between them. Pakistan's Umm-e-Hani and Nashra Sandhu went for 19 and 23 in their four apiece, and Sadia Iqbal for 21. Fatima Sana's 38 runs in 3.4 overs was by some distance the most expensive spell Pakistan bowled, which is a strange sentence to write about the bowler who took four of the six wickets to fall. She was attacking. Attacking cost runs. It also nearly won a semi-final.

One small detail worth keeping: Pakistan bowled no wides all night. Sri Lanka's five extras were three byes and two no-balls. In a chase decided with eight balls in hand, a side that gives away nothing in loose deliveries and still loses has to look elsewhere for its answers — and the place to look was the 62 runs its top five made from 75 balls.

The award is usually a sign that your team won. This one was a receipt for a debt nobody else paid.

Start with the batting. Fatima Sana came in at 52 for 4 in the tenth over, with 61 balls left in the innings, and faced 36 of them. She made 47 not out with four fours and two sixes at a strike rate of 130 on a surface where her top five had managed 82. She was still there at the end, having taken Pakistan from a total that was not defensible to one that required Sri Lanka to bat properly.

Then the bowling. She opened, and took two wickets in two balls — the opposition captain and the No. 3 — to leave Sri Lanka 5 for 2. She came back when the fifth-wicket stand had reached 67 and removed both the batters who had built it, Samarawickrama caught and Dilhari lbw, in the space of six deliveries. Four for 38 from 3.4 overs, and four of the six wickets Sri Lanka lost.

Add it up: 47 of Pakistan's 130 with the bat, and four of Sri Lanka's six wickets with the ball. A captain who leads from the front is a cliché. A captain who is, by the numbers, both the best batter and the best bowler on the field in her side's most important match of the year is something rarer, and Pakistan should be worried about how easily she carries the whole thing alone.

She finished the night holding a trophy she would have traded in a heartbeat for eight more runs.

This match didn't have a CricIntel preview — we'll have full analysis for the next encounter.

Sri Lanka go to the final having won a semi-final from 33 for 4, which is a useful thing to have in the bank. Their route there was not built on their biggest names — Athapaththu made 5, Kavindi 0 — but on Samarawickrama and Dilhari batting sensibly for nine overs and on two finishers who took 25 from ten balls when the pressure was at its highest. That is a deeper side than one that relies on its captain, and Athapaththu's own 2 for 24 with the ball was as valuable as anything she has done with the bat this week.

The concern is the start. Five for 2 in the second over, then 33 for 4, against an attack missing nothing but a second wicket-taker. A top order that keeps needing rescuing will eventually meet a total it cannot rescue itself from.

Pakistan go home, and go home unluckily. They lost by four wickets to a side they had 33 for 4. They conceded no wides. Their captain produced the best individual performance of the match by a distance. The single problem they have to solve is also the most familiar one in their cricket: five batters made 62 from 75 balls in a semi-final, and no amount of leadership from No. 6 can consistently cover that. Shawaal Zulfiqar's 24 from 16 showed the intent is available. Gull Feroza's 32-ball 21 showed the temperament is too. Getting both from the same batter, in the same innings, is the work ahead.