Sri Lanka’s newest opening pair, Danushka Gunathilaka and Niroshan Dickwella slammed their maiden ODI hundreds on Thursday to steer the home team to an 8-wicket win in Sooriyawewa, Hambanthota.
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Throughout the last decade, it was Sanath Jayasuriya, TM Dilshan and Upul Tharanga who scored big, match winning centuries for Sri Lanka at the top of the order, with less than two years to go for the ICC World Cup in 2019, the island nation have finally found the right, young, energetic opening combination.
Man of the match and one of the architects from the 229-run opening stand, Gunathilaka shared his views on how they approached the chase, “I started off playing aggressively but we changed our styles accordingly, when he (Dickwella) scores quickly, I play the second fiddle and when I’m on a roll scoring quick runs, he gave me the strike more often. “ Gunathilaka said. “Initially, we did not look at the final target because with our strong batting lineup, we knew we just wanted to put up a good platform by playing our normal game and assess after the first 20 overs. “
Apart of being opening partners in the cricket field, Gunathilaka and Dickwella are very close friends off the field and they feature so much in each other’s social media accounts quite often, spending leisure time together, partying together and dining together.
“Since I was a kid, Dickwella is one of the four best friends in my life. Because we are good friends off the field, it’s very easy to bat with him and play cricket together. I’m glad we both scored our first centuries in the same match. His knock deserves all the credits as well because that was a great innings.” Gunathilaka said after the third match.
Prior to this match, both the left-handers were guilty of not playing long innings after getting electric starts in the recent past. They had never scored a century in international cricket until today and had a total of only 12 half-centuries in 58 matches combinedly.
“We always take some good starts but do not convert our starts into big, match-winning performances, so we had discussed about it in recent past. We both badly wanted this maiden century to know how to play a long innings in international cricket and I’m sure after today, we will make it count whenever possible.” Gunathilaka shared his views on the importance of playing the long innings.
Dickwella scored more than half of his runs behind the wicket with plenty of scoops, late-cuts, sweeps, reverse-sweep. Gunathilaka as always played through the line on the back-foot pulling the ball comfortably and driving elegantly on the front-foot.
“Very pleasing to see the way they batted. Very encouraging to see them not getting 50s and 60s and throwing it away. They did exactly what the team wanted. Pity they couldn’t finish it through, but that was good job. Niroshan is a fearless cricketer and he wants to take on all the bowlers. Great attitude to have.“ Skipper Angelo Mathews praised his young opening pair.
