Sri Lanka’s cup of joy!

Lesson No. 1: There’s no time to relax in this game. You got to be on your toes all the time. 58 for 5 in the 9th over and allowed to finish at 170 for 6 after the 20th. Get it?

Lesson No. 2: These Sri Lankan bat deep; and bat bloody well!

Lesson No.4: Impact players like Bhanuka Rajapaksha and Wanindu Hasaranga. They can often make the difference.

Lesson No. 3: Luck. It plays a massive part in any form of the game.

Sri Lanka’s innings saw everything that a neutral cricket lover would have dreamt of. Tearaway Pakistani speedsters firing those 145+ rippers, coupled with a massive swing. They were virtually unplayable. 

Then, the Sri Lankan counterattack. Initially, it came from an unlikely quarter in the form of Dhananjaya De Silva, who was crisp and elegant in his stroke play.

Then Bhanuka Rajapaksha took over. He could have been out at four had the umpire agreed with the appeal for LBW. The umpire’s call in LBW’s is an age-old debate, and Bhanuka clearly benefited on this occasion. There was no stopping him thereafter. 

Sri Lanka was tottering at 58 for five in the ninth over but Bhanuka remained unaffected. He was never in a hurry and kept on nudging the ball around, reminiscent of how Arjuna Ranatunge would have batted in this sort of situation. But he knew when to attack. It required extraordinary innings as the one Bhanuka played for Sri Lanka to pose an unimaginable target of 170.

 True, luck was with him even at the end, but to smash 70 off 45 balls in a high-pressure final like this was something truly remarkable. The Sri Lankan recovery was almost entirely due to Bhanuka.

Bhanuka was the best schoolboy cricketer Sri Lanka produced after Dinesh Chandimal. He is about six years too late to show his true potential to the world. Two stunning partnerships for the sixth and seventh wickets involving him, and Sri Lanka were able to pose a target of 171, the kind of target that Pakistan was always going to find challenging.

You may have all the pace, and spin, but when the target is as high as 171, you need to bat well, and bat intelligently.

 Pakistan is not used to batting like Sri Lanka. Their strategy is not to counterattack using a long batting line-up. They want to lay a solid foundation first through their top order so that the rest of the batters could hit out at the end.

But Pakistan was not allowed to do that in the final. Sri Lanka chipped in with two early wickets and ensured that the Pakistani top order utilised an enormous amount of deliveries in the chase. Mohammad Rizwan had a strike rate of only 104% after the 15th over. True, Pakistan recovered, but it was way too slow. 

Then Wanindu Hasaranga brought his magic at the end, changing the pace and lengths of his deliveries. The real greatness of a player is measured by his ability to make an impact when it really matters, and Wanindu has time and again proved how good he has been in this regard. 

Sri Lankan fielding was exceptional. They held onto their catches, saved boundaries and gave a masterful exhibition on the field, which made a huge difference. The result was a crushing win.

To imagine Sri Lanka had won only two of the 11 T20 matches they had played running into this tournament. Imagine they were simply walloped in their first game. 

According to many experts, Sri Lanka was the weakest of the five competing Test-playing nations in this Asia Cup. Their achievements are spoken of only in the past tense. They started off terribly even in the final, both when batting and bowling, just like how they started the tournament. But they quickly found a way to regroup and recover. 

They had so many players contributing at different times. Not one player scored heavily or took wickets. They found new heroes all the time.

After two weeks of high-intensity cricket, Sri Lanka has won five matches in a row. The last time it happened was in the T20 World Cup in 2014. 

Going by the kind of enthralling cricket Sri Lanka played in the Asia Cup after that crushing defeat at the hands of Afghanistan, it would have been a great injustice if they didn›t win in the end. They are perhaps the only team which played the tournament with intent and belief.

 It was such a joy watching them play, even to the neutral fan. Sri Lankan cricket was certainly on a decline, ever since the retirements of a string of legends after 2015, but now the decline is well and truly stemmed.  Now they are a force to be reckoned with, in any competition. 

And they couldn’t have done it more emphatically.