Sri Lanka Women's Cricket Team History: 1997 to Now

In April 1998, at Colombo, Sri Lanka's women played a Test match against Pakistan and won it. Chamani Seneviratna made 105 not out and took five for 31 in the same match, which is the sort of all-round performance that would define a career in any format. It remains the only Test Sri Lanka's women have played, twenty-eight years later.

That single fixture is the neatest illustration of how this team's history works. Sri Lanka's women have produced isolated performances of a very high standard — a Test win, an unbeaten 195, a series victory in England, a batter who has scored nine one-day international centuries in a side where nobody else has scored one — without ever having the surrounding structure to build on them. The results come in bursts, separated by long flat stretches.

The trajectory is upward all the same, and it has accelerated. A team that lost its first international series in 1997 and spent two decades finishing second in the regional tournament won that tournament in 2024, beating India in the final, at home.

1997: two months that created a team

Sri Lanka's women played their first one-day internationals in 1997, against the Netherlands, and lost the series 2-1. Later the same year they went to the World Cup in India, and reached the quarter-finals before losing to England.

That is a remarkable start from nothing. There was no domestic competition to speak of — the national fifty-over tournament described in the guide to Sri Lanka's women's domestic cricket did not begin until 2007 — and no age-group pathway. The players came from school and club cricket organised on goodwill, and the country reached the last eight of a World Cup within months of playing its first international.

The Test, and why there was only one

The Test came the following April: 17 to 20 April 1998, at Colombo, against Pakistan, and Sri Lanka won it. Seneviratna's century and five-wicket haul carried the match.

Nothing followed. Women's Test cricket contracted globally in the years afterwards, played almost exclusively between England, Australia and India, and a board without a multi-day women's domestic competition had neither the fixtures nor the preparation to sustain a red-ball side. Sri Lanka's women have played fifty-over and twenty-over cricket ever since. The absence of any multi-day domestic competition remains the reason a second Test is unlikely, and it is the clearest structural gap in the women's game on the island.

The World Cup record

Sri Lanka has appeared at six one-day World Cups since 1997.

Tournament	Result
1997, India	Quarter-finals
2013, India	Fifth — the best finish, and the tournament in which Sri Lanka beat England
2025, India and Sri Lanka	Fifth in the league stage as co-hosts; one win, three defeats, three no results

The 2013 tournament is the one that changed how the side was regarded. Sri Lanka beat England, then among the strongest teams in the world, in a result widely described at the time as one of the major upsets in women's one-day international history, and finished fifth overall. It was the first evidence that the team could beat a leading side rather than merely compete with one.

The 2025 tournament, co-hosted with India, was harder. Sri Lanka played seven matches, won one, lost three and had three abandoned in a rain-affected league stage, finishing fifth in the table with five points and a negative net run rate. India won the tournament, beating South Africa in the final for its first title. Playing a World Cup at home and not reaching the knockout stage was a disappointment measured against the expectation the 2024 Asia Cup had created. The broader tournament history is in the guide to the fifty-over World Cup.

Athapaththu

For most of the last fifteen years the Sri Lankan batting has been one player. Chamari Athapaththu made her one-day international debut in April 2010 against the West Indies and has since scored more than four thousand runs in the format and more than three thousand in T20 internationals.

The individual innings are the striking part. At the 2017 World Cup she made 178 not out against Australia, at the time the second-highest individual score in the history of the women's World Cup. In 2024, chasing 302 against South Africa, she made 195 not out — Sri Lanka's highest one-day score by a distance. She has nine one-day international centuries and is the only Sri Lankan woman to have scored any. She has four in T20 internationals, including an unbeaten 106 against Ireland in June 2026, and no other Sri Lankan woman has scored one of those either.

She was also the first Sri Lankan woman to play franchise cricket abroad, which mattered beyond her own career: it established that a Sri Lankan player could be picked in the Australian and Indian competitions, and several have followed. She was named the ICC's women's one-day international player of the year for 2023, and in the same year the Sydney Cricket Ground named a seating area after her.

Behind her the side has been built on bowlers rather than batters. Shashikala Siriwardene took more than 120 one-day international wickets and Inoka Ranaweera passed a hundred in both white-ball formats — durable, accurate spinners of the kind the island's cricket produces at every level, in both the men's and women's games.

Five lost finals, and then one won

The Asia Cup record is the clearest measure of Sri Lanka's steady second place in the region. Sri Lanka reached the final in 2004, 2005-06, 2006 and 2008, when the tournament was played over fifty overs, and lost all four to India. It reached the final again in 2022, when the competition had moved to a T20 format, and lost to India by eight wickets.

Then, in 2024, at home, Sri Lanka won it — beating India by eight wickets in the final, the same margin by which it had lost two years earlier. Athapaththu was player of the series. It was the country's first Women's Asia Cup title and the first time India had been beaten in a final of the competition since Bangladesh managed it in 2018.

The significance is not only the trophy. Sri Lanka's women had lost five finals to India across twenty years, and the record had become part of how the side was described. Winning one against the same opponent, in front of a home crowd, changed the internal expectation more than any individual performance had. The longer story of the fixture between the two countries is in the guide to the Sri Lanka and India rivalry.

England, 2023

The best away result came the previous year. In 2023 Sri Lanka won a bilateral T20 international series in England, 2-1 — the first time Sri Lanka's women had won a series in England, and the first time England had lost a bilateral T20 international series to any side other than Australia since a defeat by New Zealand in 2010.

The context makes it larger than the scoreline. England had by then been professional for years, with central contracts, a domestic regional structure and a full-time coaching staff; Sri Lanka's players were coming from a domestic system in which the leading clubs are the navy, army and air force. The fixture's longer history is covered in the guide to the Sri Lanka and England rivalry.

The T20 World Cup gap

Against all of that sits one persistent failure. Sri Lanka has played in every women's T20 World Cup since the competition began in 2009 and has never got beyond the first round.

The 2026 tournament in England followed the pattern. Sri Lanka qualified directly on its T20 international ranking, was drawn in a group with England, New Zealand, the West Indies, Ireland and Scotland, and did not advance; Australia won the tournament, beating England by seven wickets in the final for a seventh title.

The reason usually given is the same one that explains the 2025 one-day campaign: a batting order in which one player carries a disproportionate share, in a format where a single dismissal can decide a match. The tournament's own history is set out in the T20 World Cup guide.

Where the side is now

The team is in a stronger position than at any previous point, and the strength is not evenly distributed. It holds a regional title, it has beaten England in England, and it has players in overseas franchise competitions who return with experience the domestic game cannot provide.

What it does not yet have is a second batter of international class to stand alongside Athapaththu, or a domestic system deep enough to guarantee one. The reforms to girls' school and district cricket described in the guides to Sri Lanka's women's domestic cricket and the schools system were designed to produce exactly that, and the players they were built for are only now reaching senior cricket. The wider question of how women's cricket has grown as a professional sport is covered in the explainer on the growth of women's cricket, career records are in the player index, and the rest of the island's game sits on the cricket in Sri Lanka hub.

Sources and method

This page uses ICC records for women's World Cup and women's T20 World Cup results including Sri Lanka's placings and the 2025 and 2026 tournament outcomes, Asian Cricket Council records of Women's Asia Cup finals and winners, the published scorecard of the April 1998 Test against Pakistan, and published career records for the players named. Contemporary reporting is the source for the 2013 win over England and the 2023 series win in England. Career aggregates for active players change with every match and are given as they stood at the most recent completed fixture. This article is descriptive; nothing on it is computed from our own datasets.