After winning the One-day international series at home against India, Sri Lanka make their trip to England for the three-match series. In the first game at Old Trafford in Manchester, the team management handed a debut cap to the 28-year-old medium pacer Milan Rathnayake.
Winning the toss, the new captain of the visiting side, Dhananjaya de Silva, decided to bat first on a track that looked good for batting. They didn’t make a great start with the bat in hand, as they lost three wickets for just six runs on the board. When they reached 40, Kushal Mendis returned to the dressing room.
At one point in time, it felt like the Sri Lankan side would be rolled over under 150 before their captain, de Silva, showed excellent batting in an exciting partnership of 63 runs for eight wickets with Milan Rathnayake, who looked solid with the bat in hand.
Milan Rathnayake goes past Balwinder Sandhu during the Manchester Test
Milan Rathnayake shared another phenomenal partnership of 50 runs with Vishwa Fernando for the ninth wicket, as the former showed great resilience with the bat in hand. It wasn’t about the customary number nine batter, who would always look to slog the ball from the start and hope it to come on the middle of the bat.
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He smashed the spinners all around the park, besides being careful against the different plans that Ollie Pope and his men were making during his stay. Milan Rathnayake finished with a 72-run knock in 135 balls, shouldering on six boundaries and a couple of sixes with a strike rate of 53.33.
The 28-year-old lanky pacer has featured in 40 first-class games where he has picked up 81 wickets at an average of under 33 and a strike rate of 54.2, celebrating one five-wicket haul and three four-wicket hauls, besides scoring 660 runs in 52 innings, at an average of just over 16, registering a couple of fifties with a best score of 59, coming into the opening game of the three-match series.
The left-handed batter, Milan Rathnayake, quite wisely tackled the opposition’s pace duo of Chris Woakes and Gus Atkinson to propel the visiting team to 236 in the first innings of the game.
His 72-run knock is now the highest individual score at number nine for the Sri Lanka side in a Test match on debut, as he went past M Lakshitha, who smashed 40 runs against Bangladesh in 2002 at the Colombo (SSC).
Milan Rathnayake also surpassed India’s Balwinder Sandhu’s 71-run knock, which came against Pakistan in Hyderabad in 1983, to now hold the record of most runs at number nine by a batter in men’s red-ball game.
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Despite his heroics, the score isn’t expected to be enough for the visiting side, as the track still looks to be quite solid and perfect for batting. The spinners have come to the party in phases, while the overhead conditions could make it comfortable for the pacers to look for early swing. With the bad light, Dhananjaya decided to start with spinners, as both England batters smashed 22 runs without any damage in the longest format of the game.
The second day will see Milan Rathnayake, showing his class with the ball in hand, as the tourist, will hope to pick a few early wickets to put the home side under pressure in the absence of their regular captain, Ben Stokes.