Women’s cricket is evolving fast, reckons Rumesh Ratnayake

He bowled Sri Lanka to its first ever Test victory. That was in 1985, but four decades later, Rumesh Ratnayake still remembers how he got the better of a world-class Indian batting line-up that boasted the likes of Sunil Gavaskar, Dilip Vengsarkar and Mohinder Amarnath at Colombo.

The quick, who used to wear a white headband, took four for 76 and five for 49 to lead Sri Lanka to a historic 149-run win in the second Test at Colombo. The islanders went on to win the three-match series 1-0.

“For that series, we had wickets that were conducive to pace,” said Ratnayake in an exclusive interview with The Hindu. “That was our strategy, but we probably would not have made pitches like that if we were playing Pakistan, though.”

Gavaskar had chosen to bat in the middle-order in that series, in which K. Srikkanth, debutant Lalchand Rajput and Ravi Shastri were the openers. “India had a great batting line-up those days, with Gavaskar, Amarnath and Vengsarkar, who had such a lazy elegance to his batting,” said Ratnayake during Sri Lanka’s women’s T20I series against India. Incidentally, the final match in the series here was his last as the coach.

He had taken over when the team was going through a rough patch, some three years ago. Under him, the Lankan women beat South Africa in T20I series in South Africa and England and stunned India in the Asia Cup final.

“I was absolutely new to women’s cricket and I accepted the job only after the then coach Hashan Tillakaratne, my friend, joined the Bangladesh team,” said the man who took 149 wickets from 23 Tests and 70 ODIs. “I saw potential in the team and I gave them confidence. I wasn’t harsh on them when they made mistakes, like dropping a catch. In the very first match we played, against South Africa at the 2023 T20I World Cup, we won.”

He believes women’s cricket is evolving fast. “Some of the sixes you see in women’s cricket today are almost as big as the ones that were scored by the men 30 years ago,” he said.