If the human spirit’s triumph over adversity is the greatest thing about sport, there are few more compelling sports stories in the world right now than of Sri Lanka’s women cricketers.
Watch the back end of the highlights of their Women’s Asia Cup 2024 win in Dambulla on Sunday, and try not to feel something. Jump in at 10:02, and watch Kavisha Dilhari run down the pitch at Radha Yadav, and launch the ball at least ten metres beyond the deep-midwicket boundary.
Dilhari is not a player renowned for her power. She’d batted in 43 T20I innings before this, and hit exactly zero sixes. But what she’s lacked in muscle, she’s always had in audacity, because in the second international innings of her career, batting as low as No. 9, Dilhari got low and scooped seamer Mansi Joshi over the wicketkeeper, executing one of the most difficult shots in her sport before hitting the winning runs to seal a tense match. She was 17 at the time.
Six years later, she’s up at No. 4 in the batting order striding in to the Asia Cup final after Sri Lanka have lost their best player, Chamari Athapaththu, the requirement still 73 off 48 balls. Dilhari’s sixteen-ball innings is electric. The stands and banks at the ground are not only full, they are raucous.
There is a greater proportion of women in attendance than usual, some in long dresses, some in jeans, some in hijabs, some with their children, almost all of them screaming at every Sri Lanka run at this point.
Dilhari fails to score off only three balls through her stay. She whips between the wickets, scythes a four through extra cover, then goes deep in her crease to crash another six down the ground off the fourth ball of the 19th over, and wins the match with that shot.
It is not nothing to watch women make history here. Not nothing to watch Dilhari celebrate as aggressively as she deserves or to watch Samarawickrama collapse after producing such a clutch innings. Not nothing to see Athapaththu let others take the limelight in a narrative whose trajectory she has influenced more than any other figure
She is amped. She drops her bat, bear-hugs her batting partner with the power of an industrial compactor, sprints off to the side, rips off her batting gloves and throws them in elation.
Harshitha Samarawickrama, who has played the innings of her life to propel Sri Lanka to victory, collapses to the ground, and sobs, as team-mates rush the field and round on her.
Off in the distance, Athapaththu, one of Sri Lanka’s greatest ever, and very arguably the country’s premier athlete at this moment, strides in to the field still trying to process what has happened. In the previous overs, when the match hung in the balance, she’d paced the boundary like an anxious parent on exam day.
Later, when it’s time to lift the trophy, Athapaththu hands it off to her team-mates and squats near the edge of the group in the victory photo. On the international stage, she has had to frequently fight for her place, often overlooked in lucrative franchise competitions, even as she’s been her national team’s talisman for years. Here, when she has every reason to be front and centre, she cedes ground to younger players.
What is happening on the field here is special. Samarawickrama had dropped two catches earlier in the match and told herself “no matter how many runs India score, I will make sure I hunt them down”, and stayed true to her promise to herself. Athapaththu, at the tail end of a glittering career, is revelling in a trophy win, for once. She is one of the greatest-ever figures in the women’s game, but had played no matches between March 2020 and January 2022, partly because of Covid, but also because her board had not thought women’s cricket a priority.
Others like Dilhari are ecstatic at having broken down a door for the island’s women. Earlier, while bowling, she had kicked at the ground contemptuously when the umpire had not given what should have been a decision in her favour. This is the kind of behaviour many old-school coaches on the island will insist is the height of impropriety in a “gentleman’s game”. But when you cheer for women’s rights, you occasionally find yourself supporting women’s wrongs as well.
But all this pales in comparison to what is happening outside the field. Because over the boundary in Dambulla, there are girls in raptures. One fan, no more than ten years old by the looks, holds a sign that in Sinhala thanks “Chamari nanda (aunty)” for being such an inspiration, and promises to be as good.
In recognition of the phenomenal victory of our Sri Lanka Women’s Cricket team in the Asia Cup 2024, Sri Lanka Cricket is thrilled to announce a reward of $500,000 USD! Your dedication, teamwork, and relentless spirit on the pitch have brought immense pride to our nation.… pic.twitter.com/rAGtbGbED1
— Sri Lanka Cricket (@OfficialSLC) July 29, 2024
On social media, women are posting photos of other women watching the match, of their mothers glued to TV screens, their grandmothers watching livestreams.
About 80 kilometres away, in Pallekele, where there is a Sri Lanka vs India men’s match about to happen, many filtering into the stadium are glued to the action in the women’s final too. They have an easier time getting into the ground than usual, because the security staff are no less enraptured by the action in Dambulla. There are men around the country watching men in the Dambulla stadium shouting themselves hoarse for women athletes.
If this sounds like the way things should be everywhere, you are probably right. But then Sri Lanka is a country in which only five per cent of the parliament is comprised of women. Even in corporate spheres, it is a land that movements such as #MeToo left behind.
It is not nothing to watch women make history here. Not nothing to watch Dilhari celebrate as aggressively as she deserves or to watch Samarawickrama collapse after producing such a clutch innings. Not nothing to see Athapaththu let others take the limelight in a narrative whose trajectory she has influenced more than any other figure.
Online debates erupted almost immediately after the win. The men’s team’s abject performances lambasted in contrast to the women’s achievements. Why is a losing team being paid so much when a winning one is compensated so poorly? It’s a good question. In February 2023, Sri Lanka Cricket announced it was raising its match fees to US$750 for women, which is very roughly about 25% of what a men’s team member earns from a limited-overs game. The men also have far better central contracts. While the cricket payment system is complicated, the 25% figure is roughly a good indicator of how well the women are paid in comparison to the men.
And yet, while the equal pay conversation is important (particularly as the women’s team draws in better crowds in Dambulla than the Lanka Premier League did), growing cricket among girls and younger women feels even more paramount. Because of this Asia Cup victory, school principals around the country may be convinced to have a girls’ cricket team, and parents are more likely to view cricket as a legitimate pathway for their children. These may be more important deliveries than any others.
Only the Sri Lanka players will know the full extent of the challenges they overcame to become Asian champions – the parents they’d had to win over, the friends they’d had to get on board, the teachers they’d had to convince.
But as they exploded in their euphoria on Sunday evening it felt like pursuing cricket had become much more realistic for many young women around the country. It felt like a sport everyone could embrace, without reservation. It also felt like a sport that belonged to more of Sri Lanka than it ever has before.
Andrew Fidel Fernando is a senior writer at ESPNcricinfo. @afidelf
