Asalanka’s 3 for 20 flattens Jaffna, and Galle Gallants win their first LPL title

Three days earlier, the same two teams had stood on the same square at the R. Premadasa Stadium and scored 470 runs between them. The Lanka Premier League final managed 249. Jaffna Kings were on the right side of the first number and the wrong side of the second, and Galle Gallants are champions of Sri Lanka’s T20 league for the first time.

Galle won by five wickets with 25 balls unused on Saturday night in Colombo, chasing 124 after bowling Jaffna out for 123 in 19.3 overs. Charith Asalanka took 3 for 20 from his four overs and was named player of the match. Eshan Malinga took 3 for 25 and finished the season as the tournament’s leading wicket-taker.

Four overs of spin that decided the final

Bhanuka Rajapaksa won the toss and batted, which on the evidence of Qualifier 1 looked like the easiest decision of the night. Kamil Mishara had made an unbeaten 108 off 55 balls on the same ground on 5 August as Jaffna posted 242 for 2, the highest total in the league’s history. On Saturday he made 41 off 32 and was the only Jaffna batter to pass 25.

Asalanka bowled Khawaja Nafay for a duck in the fifth over, had Rajapaksa lbw in the ninth after the captain burned a review on it, and had Dunith Wellalage caught in the eleventh. Jaffna were 68 for 5 by then. Mishara and Chamindu Wickramasinghe hauled them back toward respectability, but Mishara fell in the thirteenth over, and once the seventh wicket went down at 106 the last three added 17 runs between them.

Tharindu Ratnayake finished with 2 for 14 from 3.3 overs. Between them, he and Asalanka bowled 7.3 overs for 34 runs and five wickets, which is most of the story of the night.

Rogers and Kalupahana settle a nervous chase

A target of 124 does not guarantee anything, and Galle were 10 for 2 inside two overs. Sam Harper, who had made 77 in Qualifier 2 and finished the tournament with 425 runs, was caught off the fourth ball of the innings. Asalanka lasted three balls.

Thomas Rogers and Dinura Kalupahana then put on 64 for the third wicket, fifty of them in 33 balls, and the game effectively ended there. Rogers made 34 off 27 with five fours. Kalupahana hit six boundaries in a 19-ball 31 before Shakib Al Hasan bowled him. Shakib’s four overs cost 15 runs and brought two wickets, which was a fine piece of work in a losing cause.

Dasun Shanaka, Galle’s captain, walked out at 103 for 5 and hit 20 off nine balls to finish it, with Sahan Arachchige unbeaten at the other end. Arachchige had come on as the impact substitute for Malinga once Galle’s bowling was done.

Galle beat Jaffna three times out of four

The head-to-head record across the season tells you this was not an upset. Galle won the tournament opener by 36 runs on 17 July and won again by 60 runs on 23 July. Jaffna’s only win over them came in Qualifier 1, and even that took a record-breaking innings to manage.

Galle finished second in the table on 10 points, one behind Jaffna, and got to the final the long way, through a six-wicket win over Colombo Kaps in Qualifier 2 on 7 August. The franchise had been in this position before under a different name. As Galle Marvels in 2024 they lost the final to Jaffna by nine wickets.

Malinga’s 17 wickets led the competition. Asalanka scored 385 runs and became the seventh player to reach 1,000 runs in the LPL during the league stage, with Shanaka also passing the milestone during the play-offs. Lahiru Udara of Kandy Royals topped the run charts with 434, including an unbeaten 132 that is the highest individual score the league has seen.

Jaffna reached the final without an owner

Mishara was named player of the tournament for his 411 runs, which is a strange consolation for a team whose season was defined off the field as much as on it. Jaffna co-owner Manjot Kalra was arrested by Sri Lanka’s Special Investigation Unit hours before the opening match on 17 July in connection with an anti-corruption investigation. Sports Commune’s ownership was terminated on 23 July, and Sri Lanka Cricket and the league’s commercial rights holder took over the team’s contracts and day-to-day running.

The franchise only found a permanent owner on 4 August, when Anchor Sports, a Stockholm-based group co-owned by Zaheer Khan, bought it four days before the final. Jaffna reached the final anyway, which says something about Thilina Kandamby’s squad. They just ran into an attack that had their number all season.

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