It was some innings by Dasun Shanaka, the second century of his career. It came in a losing cause but a loss that could have been of over 150 runs was reduced to 73 runs loss only because of gem of an innings that he played.
Shanaka scored 108 off 88 balls while coming to bat at number 6. When he came to bat, Sri Lanka was 161 for 5 and needed an amazing innings to get close to the chasing total. However, wickets kept falling and at one stage, even 220 looked out of the view.
After being 206 for 8, Dasun Shanaka and Kasun Rajitha shared a 73 balls 100 run partnership for the eighth wicket. What is suprising that Rajitha scored only 9 off 19 balls while on the other end, Shanaka scored 91 off 54 balls.
In the last over which was already unimportant giving the context of match, Mohammad Shami tried to run out Shanaka at bowler’s end when he was only 2 runs away from century. Thankfully, Indian captain Rohit Sharma interfered and withdrew the runout appeal.
In post match conference when asked about the incident Rohit Sharma said: “Yeah, no, I mean, look, you know, we Shami, I mean, I had no idea he did that when he then went for appeal.
Again, he was batting on 98. We got to be little, you know, the way he batted was brilliant, so you gotta give it to him, you know, we cannot get him out like that. We wanted to get him out the way we thought. We will get him out, but that was not something that we thought of. But again, hats off to him. He played really good innings.”
Shanaka needed two off two balls to get his second ODI century of his career and so the skipper in nonchalant way banged the fifth ball of the over for a boundary and sixth ball for a six. Maybe the attempted runout from Shami made him go after more aggressively.
Shanaka finished with 88 balls 108 with 12 fours and 6s. The skipper played one of the finest knock of his career which has been on the rise for a last couple of years. With this century, his superb stint against India continues as he scored a 22 balls 57 during T20i series.