A troublesome boot, and the novel shin stop

From Rangana Herath's carrom ball, to Ajantha Mendis' two-finger googly, and Muttiah Muralitharan's wrist-spinning offbreaks, Sri Lanka spinners have found novel ways of contorting their fingers to send down unique deliveries over the years. So every time a new attacking bowler debuts for Sri Lanka, a little mystique is expected. The Premadasa didn't have to wait long for Jeffrey Vandersay to unveil his own tricks. His first ball was a regulation legbreak, but the second was a split-finger, seam-up slider, seemingly coming out of the front of the hand. Not expecting the ball to go on with the arm, Ahmed Shehzad aborted his attacking shot and just kept the ball out instead.

Shoaib Malik might have preferred to hit his 1000th T20 international run off the middle of his bat, but as edges go, this one off Angelo Mathews at the end of the 15th over was about as good as they get. Aiming a shot over the on side, Malik got a thick edge to a full-ish delivery and split backward point and third man so perfectly, the fielders bumped into each other, but could not prevent the ball from passing between them to the boundary.

All through the tour, Tillakaratne Dilshan's shoelaces have appeared to malfunction. Twice in the ODI series, he lost his boot while in pursuit of the ball, and he left his boot behind in the ninth over of this match as well, this time allowing the Pakistan batsmen to sneak a second run as he slowed down. Shoaib Malik merely pushed Vandersay on to the offside, but though the cover fielder did not collect cleanly, Dilshan would have kept it to a single had he kept his gear on.

With youngsters flooding this T20 side, Sri Lanka put on one of their best fielding efforts of the year, but not all the stops were conventional. Running around from deep cover to stop lofted drive from Malik, Dhananjaya de Silva dived full-bodied, but he went legs first. He managed to parry the ball with his shin and keep it inside the rope. He threw it back before the batsmen had completed the third run as well, but unaware of the run-out opportunity, bowler Binura Fernando simply collected the ball and loped back to the top of his run up.