Latest News
Asia Cup 2025: Nissanka, Mishara and Sri Lanka bowlers crush Bangladesh in NRR-boosting win
They were locked 8-8 in T20Is in the decade leading up to this match, and all signs pointed to the first close contest of this Asia Cup after it kicked off with four mismatches. It was a bit of an anticlimax in the end, however, with Sri Lanka brushing Bangladesh aside by six wickets, with 32 balls remaining.
Given the high stakes of this group-of-death contest, Sri Lanka got everything they wanted from it: two points and a massive net-run-rate boost. Bangladesh, who had already copped criticism for taking 17.4 overs to chase down 144 against Hong Kong, now face an uphill task to qualify for the Super Four.
Sri Lanka dominated the match from its extraordinary start – Nuwan Thushara and Dushmantha Chameera bowled back-to-back wicket maidens with the new ball – to its breezy finish, with Bangladesh only really competing during an unbroken sixth-wicket stand of 86 between Shamim Hossain and Jaker Ali,
That partnership, which began at 53 for 5, gave Bangladesh some sort of a total to bowl at. Very quickly, though, Pathum Nissanka’s fluency and Kamil Mishara’s power made it look like no sort of total. Nissanka scored 50 off 34 balls and became the quickest Sri Lankan batter to 2000 T20I runs, while Mishara finished unbeaten on 46 off 32.
Sri Lanka found new-ball swing after they chose to bowl, but that couldn’t have been the only reason why Tanzid Hasan and Parvez Hossain Emon struggled to the extent they did. There were signs that this was a slightly two-paced pitch when Tanzid kept failing to find the middle of the bat – or the gaps – in the first over (though two of the mishits were off full-tosses), before Thushara swung his sixth ball through his gate as he attempted a get-out-of-jail drive on the up.
The second-over contest between Chameera and Emon was similar, though it only lasted four balls. This time, the on-the-up drive ended up as an outside edge to the keeper, with the ball swinging less than the batter expected. With Chameera rounding off the over with a pair of dots to No. 4 Towhid Hridoy, the scoreboard was an extraordinary sight: 0 for 2 in two overs.
Bangladesh sank deeper into misery in the fifth over when Hridoy was run out going for a sharp and needless third run, but Litton Das made sure they didn’t let Sri Lanka have it all their own way. When they tried to slip in a quiet over from their fifth bowler Dasun Shanaka, Litton went after him – after edging his first ball just short of a diving fly slip – and hit him for three fours in the sixth over.
That did not signal a shift of momentum, though, as Wanidu Hasaranga, who had missed Sri Lanka’s recent tour of Zimbabwe with a hamstring injury, came on in the eighth over and made an almost instant impact, trapping Mahedi Hasan lbw with his second ball, a trademark wrong’un.
He came close twice more with the wrong’un. Litton, given out on-field, successfully reviewed an lbw decision against him, with the inside edge coming to his rescue. Then Jaker, beaten comprehensively while defending off the front foot, was saved by the bails staying put after the ball brushed the off stump.
Hasaranga did get a second wicket, two balls later, with Litton gloving an attempted reverse-sweep to the keeper.
Bangladesh’s sixth-wicket pair came together at 53 for 5 in the tenth over, and walked off together at the end of the innings with unbeaten 40s to their name. That both went at strike rates in the 120s, and both struggled to find the boundary for long stretches – including a barren spell of 21 balls – indicated both the excellence of Sri Lanka’s defensive bowling, particularly that of Chameera whose yorkers achieved a rare level of precision in overs 18 and 20, and the two-paced nature of this Abu Dhabi surface.
Shamim hit the only six of Bangladesh’s innings, a pick-up shot over midwicket off Matheesha Pathirana in the 19th over, and that shot and Pathirana’s figures – 0 for 42 in four overs – indicated that batters could feed off pace on the ball in these conditions.
Both these teams have had well documented issues with their T20I scoring rates in recent years, but Sri Lanka have been trendsetters in this format in previous eras. And Nissanka and Mishara showed that that spark might still endure.
Off just the fourth ball of his innings, Nissanka played what was unarguably the shot of the match up to that point, a resounding pulled six, well in front of square, off Mustafizur Rahman. And after Mustafizur hit back by nicking off Kusal Mendis, Nissanka and Mishara continued to pepper the boundary in a way Bangladesh had struggled to do throughout their innings.
This was partly down to Bangladesh bowling short balls far more frequently than Sri Lanka had, but Mishara also dispatched them with an easy, stand-and-deliver power that Bangladesh cricket has traditionally struggled to produce. None of this may have come to pass, however, had Mahedi held on to a chance at mid-on when Shoriful Islam got a short ball to get big on Mishara; he was batting on 1 off 7 at that point, and the pitch was still looking two-paced.
That spilled chance seemingly transformed the conditions too, with Mishara spanking the luckless Shoriful for 6, 4, 4 off the last three balls of the over. Nissanka, at the other end, sashayed this way and that to manipulate length and line, and timed the ball with a fluency that no one else from either side matched.
These two put on 95 in just 52 balls, and Sri Lanka could have finished things off even quicker, but they lost 3 for 18 in a 17-ball spell late in the game when they had the result all but sewn up.
Brief scores:
Sri Lanka 140 for 4 in 14.4 overs (Pathum Nissanka 50, Kamil Mishara 46*, Charith Asalanka 10*; Mustafizur Rahman 1-35, Tanzim Hasan Sakib 1-23, Mahedi Hasan 2-29) beat Bangladesh 139 for 5 in 20 overs (Litton Das 28, Shamim Hossain 42*, Jaker Ali 41*; Nuwan Thushara 1-17, Dushmantha Chameera 1-17, Wanidu Hasaranga 2-25) by six wickets
[Cricinfo]
Rescue workers are racing to find dozens of people still missing following a landslide at a landfill site in the central Philippines that occurred earlier this week, an official has said.
Mayor Nestor Archival said on Saturday that signs of life had been detected at the site in Cebu City, two days after the incident.
Four people have been confirmed dead so far, Archival said, while 12 others have been taken to hospital.
Conditions for emergency services working at the site were challenging, the mayor added, with unstable debris posing a hazard and crew waiting for better equipment to arrive.
The privately-owned Binaliw landfill collapsed on Thursday while 110 workers were on site, officials said.
Archival said in a Facebook post on Saturday morning: “Authorities confirmed the presence of detected signs of life in specific areas, requiring continued careful excavation and the deployment of a more advanced 50-ton crane.”
Relatives of those missing have been waiting anxiously for any news of their whereabouts. More than 30 people, all workers at the landfill, are thought to be missing.
“We are just hoping that we can get someone alive… We are racing against time, that’s why our deployment is 24/7,” Cebu City councillor Dave Tumulak, chairman of the city’s disaster council, told news agency AFP.
Jerahmey Espinoza, whose husband is missing, told news agency Reuters at the site on Saturday: “They haven’t seen him or located him ever since the disaster happened. We’re still hopeful that he’s alive.”
The cause of the collapse remains unclear, but Cebu City councillor Joel Garganera previously said it was likely the result of poor waste management practices.
Operators had been cutting into the mountain, digging the soil out and then piling garbage to form another mountain of waste, Garganera told local newspaper The Freeman on Friday.
The Binaliw landfill covers an area of about 15 hectares (37 acres).
Landfills are common in major Philippine cities like Cebu, which is the trading centre and transportation gateway of the Visayas, the archipelago nation’s central islands.
[BBC]
US President Donald Trump has asked for at least $100bn (£75bn) in oil industry spending for Venezuela, but received a lukewarm response at the White House as one executive warned the South American country was currently “uninvestable”.
Bosses of the biggest US oil firms who attended the meeting acknowledged that Venezuela, sitting on vast energy reserves, represented an enticing opportunity.
But they said significant changes would be needed to make the region an attractive investment. No major financial commitments were immediately forthcoming.
Trump has said he will unleash the South American nation’s oil after US forces seized its leader Nicolas Maduro in a 3 January raid on its capital.
“One of the things the United States gets out of this will be even lower energy prices,” Trump said in Friday’s meeting at the White House.
But the oil bosses present expressed caution.
Exxon’s chief executive Darren Woods said: “We have had our assets seized there twice and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen and what is currently the state.”
“Today it’s uninvestable.”
Venezuela has had a complicated relationship with international oil firms since oil was discovered in its territory more than 100 years ago.
Chevron is the last remaining major American oil firm still operating in the country.
A handful of companies from other countries, including Spain’s Repsol and Italy’s Eni, both of which were represented at the White House meeting, are also active.
Trump said his administration would decide which firms would be allowed to operate.
“You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all. We don’t want you to deal with Venezuela,” he said.
The White House has said it is working to “selectively” roll back US sanctions that have restricted sales of Venezuelan oil.
Officials say they have been coordinating with interim authorities in the country, which is currently led by Maduro’s former second-in-command, Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez.
But they have also made clear they intend to exert control over the sales, as a way to maintain leverage over Rodríguez’s government.
The US this week has seized several oil tankers carrying sanctioned crude. American officials have said they are working to set up a sales process, which would deposit money raised into US-controlled accounts.
“We are open for business,” Trump said.
On Friday, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to prohibit US courts from seizing revenue that the US collects from Venezuelan oil and holds in American Treasury accounts.
Any court attempt to access those funds would interfere with US foreign relations and international goodwill, the executive order states.
“President Trump is preventing the seizure of Venezuelan oil revenue that could undermine critical US efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela,” the White House wrote in a fact sheet about the order.
The US and its partner forces have carried out large-scale strikes against Islamic State (IS) group targets in Syria, the US Central Command (Centcom) has announced.
US President Donald Trump directed the strikes on Saturday, which are part of Operation Hawkeye Strike, in retaliation to the IS group’s deadly attack on US forces in Syria on 13 December, Centcom wrote on X.
The strikes were conducted in an effort to combat terrorism and protect US and partner forces in the region, according to Centcom.
“Our message remains strong: if you harm our warfighters, we will find you and kill you anywhere in the world, no matter how hard you try to evade justice,” Centcom said.
The US and its partner forces fired more than 90 precision munitions at more than 35 targets in an operation that involved more than 20 aircraft, an official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.
The official added that aircraft including F-15Es, A-10s, AC-130Js, MQ-9s and Jordanian F-16s had taken part in the strikes.
The location of the strikes and the extent of any casualties is not yet clear.
“We will never forget, and never relent,” Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X on Saturday in reference to the military action.
The Trump administration first announced Operation Hawkeye Strike in December after an IS gunman killed two US soldiers and a US civilian interpreter in an ambush in Palmyra, located in the centre of Syria.
“This is not the beginning of a war – it is a declaration of vengeance,” Hegseth said when announcing the operation in December.
“The United States of America, under President Trump’s leadership, will never hesitate and never relent to defend our people.”
Prior to the latest strikes on Saturday, US forces killed or captured nearly 25 IS group members in 11 missions between 20 December and 29 December as part of Operation Hawkeye Strike, Centcom said.
In the operation’s first mission on 19 December, US and Jordanian forces carried out a “massive strike” against the IS group, deploying fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery to strike “more than 70 targets at multiple locations across central Syria”, according to Centcom.
That operation, it said, “employed more than 100 precision munitions” targeting known IS infrastructure and weapons sites.
[BBC]
GENERAL WEATHER FORECAST FOR NEXT 36 HOURS
National Communication Programme for Child Health Promotion (SBCC) has been launched. – PM
Level I landslide early warnings issued to the Districts of Badulla, Kandy, Matale and Nuwara-Eliya extended
Rescuers race to find dozens missing in deadly Philippines landfill collapse
Trump seeks $100bn for Venezuela oil, but Exxon boss says country ‘uninvestable’
US military strikes Islamic State group targets in Syria, officials say
‘Dates have the highest sugar content to fight Coronavirus’
Sunday Island 27 December – Headlines
#SundayIsland 17th December – Headlines
Sunday Island – 28th March
Sunday Island Headlines – 21 March
Sunday Island – 21st February – Headlines
-
News12 hours agoSajith: Ashoka Chakra replaces Dharmachakra in Buddhism textbook
-
News6 days agoInterception of SL fishing craft by Seychelles: Trawler owners demand international investigation
-
News6 days agoBroad support emerges for Faiszer’s sweeping proposals on long- delayed divorce and personal law reforms
-
Opinion3 days agoThe minstrel monk and Rafiki, the old mandrill in The Lion King – II
-
Features3 days agoThe Venezuela Model:The new ugly and dangerous world order
-
News12 hours ago65 withdrawn cases re-filed by Govt, PM tells Parliament
-
Latest News2 days agoRain washes out 2nd T20I in Dambulla
-
Business2 days agoSevalanka Foundation and The Coca-Cola Foundation support flood-affected communities in Biyagama, Sri Lanka