Sri Lanka 117/3 beat England (116 all out) by seven wickets
Four days after being bowled out for 104 in Chelmsford, this was another below-par performance from England, who suffered a first ever T20 series defeat at the hands of a superb Sri Lanka side.
Where England struggled with the bat, Sri Lanka shone. Their captain, Chamari Athapaththu, made light work of England’s bowling on a chastening night in Derby where the hosts’ vulnerabilities were exposed by savvy bowling from Sri Lanka’s Kavisha Dilhari.
Heather Knight’s experimental outfit, by contrast, were rolled over for 116 with a whole over to spare as Sri Lanka ripped into this T20 decider after winning the toss and elected to bowl.
Was it the heat? Or simply Sri Lanka’s unexpected brilliance? For a country that enjoys a fraction of the funding and resources of their English counterparts – who also have a thriving regional structure – this was a huge milestone in their history, ending a 20-year wait to win a series outside of Asia.
Their momentous win was celebrated by a dozen Sri Lankans in a pocket of the Incora Ground, who were ecstatic at watching them complete a demolition job in Derby over the second-best ranked nation in women’s T20 cricket.
For England, it will be an evening they will want to forget, although their head coach, Jon Lewis, stressed it was a learning curve for his developmental outfit. “We’ve got three teenagers playing for us at the moment,” he said. “For me, that’s fantastic. But they will now go away from this experience and learn how to improve their game. We’re on a journey. We’re trying to work out how we want to play and the mindset we want to go into each game with. You won’t find that out unless you expose them to international cricket.”
Danni Wyatt’s golden duck and a horror mix-up between Alice Capsey and Maia Bouchier set the tone for England’s lacklustre display. The latter swung the ball to square leg and both batters began running for two, only for Bouchier to gingerly shuffle back to her crease without communicating with Capsey. Stranded at the same end, it was a simple dismissal for Sri Lanka’s wicketkeeper. Capsey was livid.
How they missed their big guns in Nat Sciver-Brunt, Sophia Dunkley and Sophie Ecclestone – who are all missing this series through either squad management or injury. Lewis had no regrets in leaving out some of his squad’s more experienced heads, which England lacked as they tried to rebuild after their calamitous start, and was confident his side would reap the rewards in the long term, with next year’s T20 World Cup in Bangladesh on the horizon.
“If you don’t expose young players to more pressure, then they might be used to normally, then you never know how far their ceiling is ahead of them,” he said, bullishly. “The decision making before the series was all about giving people who have been sitting on the edge of our squad opportunities to find out what they’re about under pressure. It’s a really valuable exercise for us.”
Knight added a touch of her usual calmness but was sent on her way after a failed reverse sweep sparked another calamitous period, as England suffered the loss of three wickets in 11 balls before 17-year-old Mahika Gaur was thrown into the fire and caught lbw on her first ball.
Sri Lanka’s middle order had barely been exposed to the pressure of winning a bilateral series over the past two decades, after captain Athapaththu led the charge with the bat with 44 off 28 balls. The sight of their captain falling six balls shy of her fifty might have dented their confidence, but on a night when they belied their status as a semi-professional outfit, Harshitha Madavi and Anushka Sanjeewani saw them over the line. Sarah Glenn dismissing the latter at her home ground was a small positive for England.
Sri Lanka will be buoyed by making history here – winning consecutive matches for the first time against a top eight nation – and will look to take that momentum into the ODI leg of the series, which begins this Saturday in Durham.
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