Since making her international debut in the 2009 T20 World Cup at the age of 19, Chamari Athapaththu, now the captain of Sri Lanka’s women’s national team and a record-breaking batter, has carried the hopes of her cricket-mad country – and of women’s cricket – on her shoulders.
Athapaththu first picked up a cricket bat at the age of five. It was a gift from her uncle, a cricket coach. But it was Sanath Jayasuriya, an all-rounder and key player in Sri Lanka’s 1996 Cricket World Cup-winning men’s team, that inspired her to dream of playing cricket herself. The next year, her uncle helped her realise that her dream could become a reality.
“My uncle bought me a newspaper which had an article and a photograph of the Sri Lankan women’s cricket team, which was participating at a World Cup for the very first time,” Athapaththu told me during an interview at the T20 World Cup last year. “After seeing that I was really inspired and started dreaming of representing Sri Lanka one day too.”
Athapaththu and I were born five months apart. Like her, I grew up watching the Sri Lankan men’s team at the height of their powers, the 1996 win igniting a national passion for the sport that remains decades later.