Pakistan Women Finally Win One — a Spin Squeeze at Dambulla, 113 Defended Against, and a Consolation That Was Overdue

Consolation wins have a bad name in cricket, and it is not entirely deserved. There is a version of the dead rubber where a beaten side goes through the motions and loses again, and there is a version where a side that has spent a fortnight being told what it cannot do finally does it, and takes something home that will matter in six months. Pakistan Women played the second version at Dambulla on Tuesday.

They had lost the ODIs. They had lost the T20I series inside two games, the second of them to a 17-year-old on debut. And on a Dambulla surface that had been giving batters 175 and getting them chased, they bowled Sri Lanka out of the match — not with anything dramatic, but with four spinners, fifteen overs between them, and a total of 113 for 6 that never once threatened to become 150. Then they made hard work of the chase, as sides in their position usually do, and got there anyway with ten balls in hand.

The pitch was the first thing Pakistan got right, and the toss was the second. Dambulla had produced 175 and a comfortable chase on Sunday; on Tuesday it was appreciably slower, and Muneeba Ali read it, put Sri Lanka in, and then bowled to it. Fifteen of the twenty overs were spin. Momina Riasat's 4-0-18-2 was the best of them, but the more instructive figures belong to Nashra Sandhu — four overs, 17 runs, one wicket — because Sandhu is the bowler Sri Lanka were most likely to have a plan for and they never got after her. Tuba Hassan added 1 for 20. Between them, those three sent down twelve overs for 55.

What that does to a T20 innings is not obvious until you look at the card afterwards. Nobody in Sri Lanka's top seven was dismissed cheaply enough to call it a collapse. Athapaththu made 34, Sanjana Kavindi 20, Imesha Dulani 17, Kavisha Dilhari 12; the fall of wickets was spread across the innings rather than clustered. And yet the total was 113, because six of the eight batters who faced a ball scored at a strike rate below 105. That is what a spin squeeze looks like. There is no highlight reel. There is just an innings where nobody could get the ball away, and a scoreboard at the end that everyone is surprised by.

Sri Lanka will not lose much sleep over it — they had the series won before the coin went up, they have found a genuine talent in Sanjana Kavindi, and Chamari Athapaththu remains the axis around which everything turns. But there is a warning in this scorecard that is worth them reading. Sri Lanka have now been given two pitches this series that suited them and one that did not, and on the one that did not they had no method beyond hoping Athapaththu batted through. When she was caught at deep midwicket off Momina Riasat for 34, the innings had 60 balls left and no plan for them.

Harshitha Samarawickrama's dismissal for 3 was the moment the innings settled into what it became. She was Sri Lanka's most fluent batter in the second T20I with 37 not out; here she got a slower ball from Ayesha Zafar — a part-time over, the only one she bowled — and holed out. Ayesha Zafar's single over cost six runs and took the wicket of the best-set batter in the country not named Athapaththu. Games turn on smaller things than that.

Pakistan's chase was not comfortable, and pretending otherwise would insult everyone who watched it. Shawaal Zulfiqar started fast — 21 from 12 — and was bowled by Kavisha Dilhari. Muneeba Ali made 19 from 16 and fell to Dilhari as well, caught at short fine leg. Najiha Alvi went for 5. At 60-odd for 3 with a required rate that was gentle but a pitch that was not, Pakistan were one wicket from turning a 114-run target into a story about a team that cannot win.

Ayesha Zafar is what stopped that happening. She made 39 from 31 — not a rapid innings, deliberately not a rapid innings — and the value of it was entirely in its shape. She took the singles that were on offer, she waited for the two or three balls per over that a slow pitch mis-delivers, and she made sure that whoever came in at the other end never had to face a rising asking rate. When Athapaththu finally bowled her, Pakistan needed 20-odd, and Saira Jabeen and Tuba Hassan walked it home with ten balls to spare.

This match didn't have a CricIntel preview — we covered the first T20I of this series on July 31 and reviewed the second on August 2, but we had nothing published ahead of the decider. Full analysis returns when these sides next meet.

Where this leaves them. Sri Lanka take the T20I series 2-1 and end the home summer against Pakistan with the ODIs and the T20Is both in the cabinet — a comfortable, mostly convincing few weeks, with Sanjana Kavindi the clearest gain and the middle-order's problem-solving on a slow pitch the clearest thing to work on. Pakistan go home having lost almost everything on this tour and having found two things worth keeping: a spin group that can defend a small total against a top-eight side, and Ayesha Zafar, who has now produced the innings of the match in a game her team needed to win. It is a thin return for a long tour. It is not nothing.