Cricket turned upside down Girl takes nine wickets in T20 match

Laura Cardoso

With T20 cricket virtually replacing Test and ODI versions of the sport, another extraordinary feat has taken place where a girl in football-mad Brazil took nine wickets in a match against Lesotho which is a country embedded inside South Africa.

The match was played in Botswana.

Laura Cardoso become the first player to take nine wickets in a T20 international when she ended with figures of 9 for 4 as Lesotho were bowled out for 13 runs in 6.2 overs while faced with a target of 203.
Cardoso who bowls medium pace needed just three overs to create the record that may or may not be unbroken.

She is 21 years old and broke the bowling record set by Sonam Yeshey from Bhutan who took eight wickets for seven runs against Myanmar in a men’s T20 international in 2025.

In women’s cricket, Cardoso surpassed Indonesia’s Rohmalia Rohmalia’s figures of 7-0 against Mongolia in 2024.

Cricket Brazil president Roberta Moretti, who witnessed all of Cardoso’s dismissals from her position at first slip, said her team-mate is a player with huge potential.

“I don’t think this is the end. She’s still only 21 and I believe Laura is someone who can one day play at the elite level in England and Australia,” she told BBC Sport. 

“For me it’s a joy to see an athlete like Laura becoming the cricketer she is, with her work ethic and passion for the game”.

Cardoso started her remarkable run of dismissals by taking wickets with five consecutive deliveries from the last three balls of the second over and first two of the fourth to leave Lesotho sprawling on 8-5.

She took two further wickets in the remainder of the over, recording a second maiden, then removed another pair of batters in the fifth over.

However she was denied a 10-wicket haul when Marianne Artur had Lindiwe Polaki, one of only three Lesotho batters to score a run, stumped to conclude the match.

Brazil are unbeaten in five matches at the six-team Kalahari Women’s T20 tournament, which is being staged entirely in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana.