It was a case of so close and yet so far for the Colombo Stars as they suffered a 1 run defeat against Dambulla Giants in the Lanka Premier League 2021. This is now the narrowest margin of defeat by runs in the league’s two-season history.
Colombo’s Dinesh Chandimal, who probably played the innings of the season so far, scoring an unbeaten 65 off just 40 balls, when only one other batter was able to get onto the double figures, was the star of the game but finished on the losing side.
When Chandimal walked in to bat, Stars’ skipper Dhananjaya de Silva was batting on 15 off 16 balls and the team was struggling at 38-4, needing 101 from 73 balls with the Giants’ spinners tightening the grip ever so effectively.
The experienced and most reliable duo then started building the partnership to chase down 139. Having added 32 off 26 balls, the partnership was broken by a brilliant catch at the boundary ropes from Chamika Karunaratne off the bowling of Tharindu Ratnayake.
Chandimal though started teeing off just after the fall of that wicket even as wickets kept falling from the other end. He completed his 25th T20 fifty on the way and almost got his team to a win.
From 52 needed off 24 balls, it was only the brilliance of the 32-year old that he brought down the target to 13 off the last over even as the 18th over by Imran Tahir brought only four runs.
In the last over too, he started well by hitting a four of the first ball, with 8 needed from four balls, Dushmantha Chameera got out and now eight runs were required off the three balls, Chandimal played a dot and the target came to 8 off two, before two runs were taken off the penultimate ball to bring the equation to a heroic requirement, six off the last ball to win.
The final ball was a length ball, slightly rising, but there to be hit. However, Chandimal had already shifted towards the offside, but he controlled himself, swivelled on one foot and then raised it over the fine-leg boundary only to find it falling just a few yards short of the ropes and going for a four.
Chandimal was on his knees and then fell flat on the ground as all his efforts has come to zero as his team remained bottom of the table after the one-run loss.
Earlier in the evening, after winning the toss and deciding to bat first, the team from Dambulla had a good start, but couldn’t relay convert it. At the start of the innings, they were 48 without loss in the first five overs.
But once they lost both openers in Phil Salt and Nisroshan Dickwella in quick succession, the wickets just kept falling. In the end, they could only get up to 138-9 in 20 overs. Dickwella top-scored for Stars with 30 off 16 balls.
Experienced Jeffrey Vandersay picked up three wickets with his leg spinners while another leggie Seekuge Prasanna picked two wickets as well. West Indian import for Stars, Ravi Rampaul, who was taken for cleaners early on, also came back well and picked three wickets.