PROTEAS READY TO BLOOM
Rain doesn’t deter Proteas women’s team
SA’s women team complete training for T20 World Cup
Proteas women’s coach Hilton Moreeng has urged his team to trust their training and preparation after rain caused the team’s first two practice sessions to be cancelled in St Lucia.
With just two days to go to their first ICC Women’s World T20 appearance against Sri Lanka, SA have yet to put bat to ball since arriving on the island, but the coach says this has not knocked the team’s confidence.
“Weather is something that you can’t control; we experienced this well in our tour against West Indies in Trinidad last month,” he commented at rain-soaked Gros Islet Cricket Ground on Saturday.
“It] has been frustrating but we also know that these are some of the areas of the game we don’t have control over. We need to worry about what we can control. Our performance on any given day, our preparation building up to this tournament, those are all controllables.
“As far as the players are concerned, if they had to be woken up tomorrow and told they have to play a match, they would know what they would have to do because the preparation has been done.”
While the Proteas’ bowlers have enjoyed success in West Indian conditions during the team’s four warm-up matches , the batting unit visibly struggled on the low and slow wickets and were restricted to scores below 100 in two of their encounters.
Moreeng is confident the issues have been addressed and that even though the team did not return a positive result during their warm-up matches, the games themselves served their purpose.
“As a squad we’re in a very good place,” he explained. “Bar the results from the warm-up games, which is what it was – warm-up cricket, they gave us an opportunity to try different combinations as a team and to see what will be required on these conditions.
“When you look at the combinations we’ve tried, we’ve given everyone in the squad a run and they have a good idea of what will be needed from them. We have such a good squad that anyone can play on any day. I think if you look overall at all of the teams during the warm-up matches you’ll see that they all struggled with the bat at some point.
“Obviously that’s not the bar we set for ourselves, but we acknowledge the difficult conditions for batting. It’s why we were here so early so we can get enough games under our belts to make sure that it’s not such a shock to the system when we play on difficult batting tracks.
“The conditions have changed every day. One day seamers are bowling well, some days it’s spinners, batters have struggled mostly but we’ve seen when batters stay patient and work themselves in they will always find themselves scoring freely,” he said.
Top order batter Robyn Searle echoed her coach’s remarks.
“I think that cliché saying ‘you either win or you learn’ is something we’ve got going for us at the moment,” she said.
SA’s first World T20 match against Sri Lanka on Monday, November 12 at 8pm will be broadcast live on SuperSport 2.
SA squad: Dané van Niekerk (Eastern Province captain), Chloe Tryon (KwaZulu-Natal Coastal) Lizelle Lee (North West), Suné Luus (Northerns), Shabnim Ismail (Gauteng), Masabata Klaas (North West), Mignon du Preez (Northerns), Marizanne Kapp (EP), Laura Wolvaardt (Western Province), Zintle Mali (Border), Robyn Searle (Gauteng), Tumi Sekhukhune (Easterns), Trisha Chetty (Gauteng), Moseline Daniels (Boland), Yolani Fourie (Gauteng).