Charith Asalanka is gritting his teeth as he follows
through on a powerful hit with his bat turned to face the bowler above his
head. A seasoned cricket observer would infer from a still of this scene that
Asalanka is in serious trouble.
Not at all. Asalanka is excellent. He just lobbed an
offcutter from Shaheen Shah Afridi past mid-off for four into the air. Mind
you, not hit a four. pushed one.
The No. 5 batter for Sri Lanka is many things. An
ex-captain of the Under-19s, a sporadic bowler who can succeed on turning decks
(as India discovered), and a dependable outfielder. He is not an attractive
cricketer, though. He lacks the effortless cool of Dhananjaya de Silva, the
fluency of Kusal Mendis or Sadeera Samarawickrama, the quick hands of Kusal
Perera, and the effectiveness of Pathum Nissanka, even simply among this
batting group.
We do not degrade batters at this place. Thus, we
won’t describe Asalanka’s cricket as ugly.
Instead, we will focus on his numerous positive
traits. Asalanka is the only middle-order batsman for Sri Lanka who can
routinely hit boundaries in the opening 15 balls of their innings. With the
eighth delivery of this game, he smacked Iftikhar Ahmed over the deep midwicket
rope (his go-to spot early in his innings).
Asalanka has only hit two boundaries in this innings,
but this four off Afridi’s offcutter, off his 34th delivery, raises his total
to 31. This reveals to you the other aspect of him that you should be aware of:
the man is skilled at bridging middle overs. Do you really need to care about
being lovely if you’re pretty quick, quite skilled, and pretty diligent?
The Asalanka might not have their chants ready just
yet. He does, however, have a body of work. No other player on the planet has
as many runs since the beginning of 2021 as the No. 5’s 1248. If you’re
curious, this has a strike rate of 90 and an average of 46.22. And this despite
the fact that he only played his first ODI in late June 2021. The next-most
productive No. 5, none other than Zimbabwe’s Sikandar Raza, is about 300 runs
behind him.
However, his teammates are full of affection for him.
In order to defend Asalanka’s wicket as she ran through to the striker’s end on
the third-to-last ball of the innings, Pramod Madushan made sure to ground his
bat at the striker’s end while the keeper’s underarm throw went through.
It turns out that Sri Lanka needed two runs off the
final ball to win. The scene that best captures Asalanka is when he receives a
slower ball on off stump and calmly moves across, clips it behind square on the
leg side where he knows there is space, puts his head down, and sprints two
rather than attempting to smash it to the boundary.
Asalanka’s teammates swarm the pitch after the victory
is assured and give him many large, wet kisses on the head. They are all
roughly six inches taller.
However, none of them has ever used a calculated flick
to deep backward square off the final ball to win a close game and advance
their side to a big final. None of them compare to Asalanka in any way.