One Hundred and Seventy-Five Was Pakistan's Best Batting of the Tour and a Seventeen-Year-Old on Debut Made It Look Ordinary

There is a specific injustice in the way T20 cricket treats a good batting innings by the side that loses. Pakistan Women played their best batting of this entire tour on Sunday at Dambulla — 175 for 5, two half-century-ish opening contributions, a finishing burst, not a single passage where they looked like they had run out of ideas. It was, by any reasonable measure, a performance. And it was over by the seventeenth over of the reply.

The reason was a 17-year-old making her first appearance in international cricket. Sanjana Kavindi came in, hit 46 from 24 balls, and by the time she was finished the equation had stopped being a chase and started being a formality. Sri Lanka got home by six wickets with fourteen balls unused, and with it took an unassailable 2-0 lead in the three-match series.

Pakistan's innings was built the way a T20 innings should be. Shawaal Zulfiqar and Muneeba Ali put on 68 inside the powerplay — Zulfiqar finishing with 48 from 35, Muneeba 45 from 30 — which is the sort of start that removes the need for anybody in the middle order to take a risk they do not want to take. Eyman Fatima's 30 from 19 at the back end pushed them past 170. On a tour that has produced very little for the visitors, this was a batting card without a hole in it.

What Pakistan did not have was a way to bowl at what came next. Sri Lanka lost early wickets and did not slow down for a single over, which is a choice rather than an accident, and it is the choice that separated these two sides.

Kavindi's innings is worth dwelling on because debut innings like it are genuinely rare. Seventeen years old, first cap, chasing 176 — the circumstances in which almost every young batter in history has played themselves in for ten balls and hoped. She scored 46 from 24 instead. The 50-run stand she put together with Vishmi Gunaratne, who made 31 from 23, was the passage that broke the chase open, and by the time she departed the required rate had been dragged below the asking rate and stayed there.

Harshitha Samarawickrama then did what she has done all series — 37 not out from 22, unhurried, present at the end. She made an unbeaten hundred in the second ODI of this tour and has now finished two chases inside a fortnight. There is a settled, almost bored quality to the way Sri Lanka's senior batters are closing games out at the moment, and it is the clearest evidence that this is a side that has stopped being surprised by winning.

Dambulla was a good surface and both teams treated it as one. A total of 175 that gets chased in 17.4 overs is not a bowling failure so much as a venue statement: the ball came on, the outfield was quick, and neither attack found a length that made scoring genuinely difficult. Pakistan will feel that a par-plus total on a flat pitch should still be defensible with better death execution, and they are right. Sri Lanka will feel that on this ground, batting second, they were always going to back themselves. Both readings are correct, which is usually the sign of a good T20 pitch.

CricIntel prediction review. CricIntel did not publish a preview for this fixture, so we have no call to defend or own. What we did write after the ODI leg of this tour was that Sri Lanka's batting depth — Samarawickrama, Gunaratne, Kavisha Dilhari — had comfortably outstripped Pakistan's, and the T20I series has so far only reinforced it. The thing nobody could have modelled is a 17-year-old debutant making 46 from 24, which is precisely why we do not pretend our numbers see everything.

What to watch. The third T20I on August 4 at the same ground is a dead rubber by the scoreline and anything but by selection. Sri Lanka have just found a teenage batter who can strike at close to 200 on debut, and the sensible thing is to give her another look at the top of an order that has room for exactly that kind of player before the next World Cup cycle. Pakistan's task is narrower and harder: they have now lost the ODI series and the T20I series on this tour, and they need to leave Sri Lanka with something — a total defended, a chase completed, one bowler who finishes with figures worth building a plan around. Their batting turned up on Sunday. It is the other half of the game they have to solve in one match.