Five Sri Lankan players — three girls and two boys — reached the semifinals of the ATF Under-16 Week 2 tennis tournament at the Sri Lanka Tennis Association courts at Greenpath, Colombo, winning their quarterfinals on Wednesday. The semifinals were scheduled for Thursday.

The three girls through are Desandi Peiris, Risindi Hewawasam and Sayli Basnayake; the boys are Buvindu Jayawardena and Yanik Dodanwela, the Daily Mirror reported on Thursday, in a report bylined M. Shamil Amit.

The number reflects the draw as much as the results

Sri Lanka filled 12 of the 16 quarterfinal places — seven of eight in the girls’ draw and five of eight in the boys’. On that arithmetic, five home semifinalists out of eight is close to what the draw alone would produce.

It follows that most quarterfinals were all-Sri Lankan, and the published results confirm it: all five Sri Lankan semifinalists advanced by beating another Sri Lankan. Peiris beat Sethuli Muthugama, Hewawasam beat Disni Samaraweera, Basnayake beat Sahele Mapitigama, Jayawardena beat Kumuditha Dalpathado and Dodanwela beat M. Pathiratne.

Only two quarterfinals put a Sri Lankan against an overseas player, and Sri Lanka lost both. India’s Harishwari Chinnakavanam beat Sayani Dinandi 5/7, 6/3, 13/11 — the longest match of the round — and India’s Gurshaan Chahal beat Udeera Gunasinghe 4/1, 4/0.

The four semifinalists are completed by Chinnakavanam, Chahal, and defending champion Anthony Castigador of the Philippines, who beat India’s Siddharth Kandukuri.

Quarterfinal results

Girls

Boys

Sri Lankans did beat overseas players — a round earlier

The quarterfinal pattern should not be read as a verdict on the home players, because the round before it ran the other way. In Tuesday’s play, also reported by the Daily Mirror, Disini Samaraweera and Desandi Peiris each beat an Indian opponent in the girls’ second round — Samaraweera over Druthi Penmesta 6/1, 6/4 and Peiris over Ahnavi Shaw 7/6, 6/3 — while Sayani Dinandi beat compatriot Yoneli Senadeera.

In the boys’ first round, Jayawardena beat Thomas Toussant of France 7/6, 7/6, the tightest match reported from the tournament, and Jathya Thalammehara beat Siyaf Shiyam. Castigador beat Vethum Kumarage 6/0, 6/0 and Kandukuri beat Nithila Methsiri 6/3, 6/2.

The field therefore draws from at least four countries — Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines and France.

One name is spelled two ways across the two reports: the player who beat Penmesta on Tuesday is Disini Samaraweera, and the player who lost to Hewawasam on Wednesday is Disni Samaraweera. Both spellings are the Daily Mirror’s own, a round apart, and the results are consistent with a single player.

Not reported

The Daily Mirror’s coverage of the boys’ draw has a gap. It reported four first-round matches on Tuesday and four quarterfinals on Wednesday, but no boys’ second-round results were published at all. Thalammehara won his first-round match and then does not appear in the quarterfinal list, so a round in which he went out was not covered. Dodanwela, Dalpathado, Gunasinghe, Chahal and Pathiratne all appear in the quarterfinals without any earlier result having been reported.

The scorelines are also inconsistent in format between the two rounds as published: Tuesday’s matches are all recorded in conventional six-game sets, while most of Wednesday’s quarterfinals are given in four-game sets with extended tiebreaks (13/11, 11/9) — Basnayake’s 6/2, 6/3 being the exception. Neither report explains the format, and this is recorded as what the published score lines show rather than as a confirmed change in the tournament’s rules.

Neither filing gives the semifinal pairings or start times, the size of the original draw, the tournament’s dates, or any result from the series’ earlier week. Both sources are the Daily Mirror, whose sports desk appears to be the only newsroom covering this event; no other verified outlet had filed on it at the time of writing.