Athapaththu Takes 7 for 5 With a Hat-Trick, and Sri Lanka's Best Batter Wins a Game Her Batters Nearly Lost

The two sides had never played each other before. That is worth saying plainly, because it explains both halves of this match — why Indonesia bowled first with a plan nobody had seen coming, and why Sri Lanka, once they had worked out what they were facing, were able to dismantle it so completely.

Indonesia won the toss, elected to field, and inside ten overs had the defending Asia Cup champions at 45 for 5. Ni Ariani bowled Imesha Dulani in the second over. Sang Maypriani, left-arm, took two in three overs. Ni Luh Dewi had Athapaththu caught at 34 for 3 and would finish with 3 for 32. Sri Lanka's powerplay produced 31 runs for two wickets and their top six produced 38 between them. At 62 for 6 in the thirteenth over, an Indonesian side that had been beaten by 71 runs by Bangladesh two days earlier were the better team on the field.

What rescued Sri Lanka was Nilakshika Silva, batting at six, playing the only innings of the match that looked like a T20 innings. She made 50 from 35 balls with three fours and a six, added 50 in 35 balls with Kawya Kavindi for the seventh wicket, and was caught at 112 in the nineteenth over having taken the game from unrecoverable to merely awkward. Sri Lanka finished on 124 for 7 — and were docked a fielder inside the circle for the last over for a slow over rate, which tells you how long the innings had taken to go nowhere.

Chamari Athapaththu is the most prolific run-scorer Sri Lanka have ever had in the format and one of the most destructive openers in the women's game. She is not a bowler. She bowls a few overs of gentle off-spin when a captain needs a fifth option and the game is already settled, and before this match she had never taken more than three wickets in a T20I innings.

She finished with 7 for 5 from 3.3 overs. It is the fifth-best bowling analysis in the history of women's T20 internationals, the first seven-wicket haul by a Sri Lankan in T20Is, and it contained the first hat-trick by a Sri Lankan — man or woman — in the format. She bowled Ni Ariani off the first ball of the nineteenth over, trapped Sang Maypriani lbw off the second, and trapped Dara Paramitha lbw off the third to end the innings. Indonesia's last three wickets fell in three deliveries for nought.

The context matters, and it should be stated honestly: Indonesia are a developing side, this was their second match of the tournament and their second heavy defeat, and their batters were not equipped to read even modest off-spin turning into the surface. Athapaththu bowled straight, full and slow, and the ball did just enough. Four of her seven wickets were lbw or bowled. This was not Anil Kumble at the Kotla; it was a good cricketer exploiting a mismatch with complete ruthlessness.

But records are records, and the discipline behind this one was real. Five runs from twenty-one deliveries against a side that needed to attack, with a single wide the only extra she conceded. Kavisha Dilhari's 3-1-2-1 and Sugandika Kumari's 3-1-3-1 tell the same story from the other end — Sri Lanka's bowlers gave Indonesia nothing to hit, and the collapse followed.

Sri Lanka won by 75 runs and topped Group B with two wins from two and a net run rate of 4.129. The scoreboard flatters them. Against Bangladesh on Sunday — a side that dismissed the same Indonesia team for 58 while defending 129 — a top order that made 38 for 5 will not be bailed out by a fifth bowler's freak afternoon.

The specifics are uncomfortable. Imesha Dulani was bowled for 3. Athapaththu made 9 from 13 and was caught trying to force the pace at 34 for 3. Harshitha Samarawickrama, the No. 3 in the T20I rankings top ten, was lbw for 5. Kavisha Dilhari made 6. Sanjana Kavindi, brought in for the injured Ayodhya, made 15 and looked the most composed of the lot before playing on. That is a defending champion's top five contributing less than a third of the total against a side ranked outside the top twenty.

Silva's 50 was the innings of a player who has been in this position before — she came in at 45 for 5 with eleven overs left and simply refused to panic, taking singles until the seventeenth over and then hitting the six that made 124 a defensible number rather than an embarrassing one.

Sri Lanka meet Bangladesh on Sunday, September 6, in what is now effectively the Group B decider — both sides are unbeaten, both have huge net run rates, and the winner takes B1 and a semi-final against the runner-up from Group A. On current form that means Pakistan, which would suit Sri Lanka considerably more than a semi-final against India.

Indonesia, whose two matches have produced 107 runs across 40 overs for the loss of twenty wickets, play UAE on Friday in a fixture both sides will regard as their most winnable of the tournament. There is no shame in what happened to them here — they were in front of the defending champions at the halfway mark of the innings, which is more than UAE managed — but the batting has some way to go.

And Athapaththu adds a line to a career that already had most of them — the leading run-scorer, the highest individual score, and now the first hat-trick and the first seven-for. Sri Lanka's problem is contained in that sentence: their captain keeps having to be all of it at once.