Versatile Kamindu hints at finding his T20 home

Sometimes you can be a victim of your own success and the way Kamindu Mendis lit the Test format alight, you did expect the guy to start crushing white-ball cricket no sweat as well. The component parts of an excellent T20I player have always been there. He's had the big leg-side heaves in his game since his Under-19 days, gets after spin, and in the field he'll rock any "hot zone", pulling off the kinds of outfield catches out of reach to all but the greatest Sri Lanka fielders.

And because this is the ambidextrous one we're talking about, Kamindu has more components than most. Offspin to the lefties, left-arm spin to the right handers - if you were putting together a T20I cricketer in a lab, you'd give them Kamindu Mendis specs.

And yet it ain't been that easy. Kamindu has never put strong T20I series together. He'd hit three fifties in 32 innings in the format before Sunday. He has produced other excellent finishing innings, such as his 41 not out off 16 balls against Zimbabwe in September.

But when you talk about the white-ball Kamindu, you begin to dip in to a lexicon you'd never apply to the red-ball Kamindu. You might call him inconsistent. A little tetchy early in the innings even, when he is needs to get off to a score rather than rely on that outstanding defence. And so things happen to white-ball Kamindu that never happen to the red-ball guy.

Like getting dropped after the December tri-series in Pakistan, so the selectors can go to a different player with a comparable skillset (Dhananjaya de Silva, in this instance). When the selectors spring back to him all of a sudden, this Kamindu Mendis is still fighting to prove why they needn't have looked elsewhere in the first place. He is still fighting to make a name.

The one thing this Kamindu perhaps has in common with that one, is they appear to enjoy batting lower in the order. In Tests, Kamindu has done his best work so far at No. 6 or lower. In this match, he was shunted a little further down the order than most would have expected, the team batting plan always having been to send Dunith Wellalage in at No. 5, and Kamindu at No. 6. Out of this slight shuffle came Kamindu's most consequential T20 innings so far.

The Sri Lanka innings had flatlined after the powerplay, Ireland's spinners getting a decent iteration of the old Khettarama spin choke working. From the end of the sixth over until the end of the 15th, Sri Lanka did not muster a single boundary - losing two wickets and scoring only 45 off 54 balls. Kamindu got himself moving with some singles and a brace of twos, before applying the defibrillator paddles to the inert body of the Sri Lanka innings.

The two Kamindus have perhaps never looked more alike. In this innings, Kamindu was creative, enterprising, and relentless, whipping out the wristy cross-bat shots, blasting deliveries that were too full down the ground, flitting around the crease to target either side, turning one big over into more. He found some luck too - he could have been caught at the straight boundary on 14, but got six for that shot instead, the fielder failing to hold on. But then that has also been known to happen to red-ball Kamindu.

In general he set about producing the kind of high-octane finishing innings Sri Lanka have so desperately lacked over the past several years, and to which his batting - with a little more expansion of the repertoire - should be suited. Kamindu carving out a long-term place at No. 6, offering a couple of overs of spin with either arm, fielding at short cover in the powerplay, deep midwicket in the middle overs, down the ground at the death. You'd be mad not to see it, right?

Without this 44 off 19, Sri Lanka might have limped only to 140, none of the other batters striking at more than 135. Sri Lanka's fans have lowered their expectations of this team substantially since they last progressed to a global tournament semi-final in 2014. But they are still expected to beat Ireland in a home World Cup.

All up, Sri Lanka's performance was unconvincing, opposition spinners tying them down too easily. They will also face more disciplined bowling than Ireland's in this tournament, Barry McCarthy at one point sending down a Russian novel of an over - an unwieldy 11-ball, four-wide, one-no ball, two-successive-wicket behemoth of a dramatic piece.

But through Kamindu they avoided an opening embarrassment. And maybe sown a little hope that Kamindu can keep flourishing in this role, which he'd always seemed made for.