Women’s World Cup 2025: Sri Lanka beat Bangladesh to keep semi-final hopes alive

In the end, it was a game of nerves. The highly experienced Athapaththu, who ushered away a handful of team-mates as she prepared to bowl the final over, held hers. Bangladesh did not.

There will be plenty of questions about Bangladesh’s batting performance. They could easily have been chasing 270 or 280 with Sri Lanka looking comfortable on 159-4 in the 30th over, but instead the target was much lower.

However, Bangladesh lacked intent from ball one, scoring at under 2.5 runs per over during the powerplay, suffering a top-order collapse, and ultimately leaving themselves too much to do.

But whatever problems there are with their batting, if they had taken their chances in the field, that 203-run target would have been considerably smaller.

It took them three attempts to break the 72-run second-wicket stand, with wicketkeeper Joty failing to take a tough chance behind the stumps to remove Perera on 23 before Athapaththu survived a caught and bowled chance against Rabeya. It was powerfully struck back at the bowler, but she got two hands to it.

Perera was dropped again on 55 and 63, the latter chance going straight to Rubya Haider Jhilik at cover, before eventually being trapped lbw by Shorna as she tried to up the ante with partners falling around her.

Later in the innings, there was also a missed stumping and a missed run-out, although the latter was a little unfortunate, with Jhilik deputising with the gloves following an injury to Joty.

Unfortunately for Bangladesh, such fielding woes are far from a one-off. They’ve dropped 14 catches from a possible 27 at this tournament and boast the lowest catch efficiency (48.1%) of the eight teams.

They are a side who are generally heading in the right direction – they are playing in just their second 50-over World Cup after all – but poor fielding is a glaring problem which needs attention.

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