Break did her a power of good
Proteas’ Lizelle Lee has taken the women’s game by the scruff of the neck.
As South Africa’s women’s cricket team prepare for their ICC World T20 in the West Indies, Lizelle Lee, who has been their most consistent whiteball batswoman, will probably be musing over how fortunate she has been to be in what she calls her “happy place” for the last few years. Especially since she had binned playing cricket at university and only began playing seriously again five years ago.
Coming from a sporting family in Ermelo, Lee showed a propensity for ball games from a young age and played for the boys’ team at JJ van der Merwe Primary School, which she continued to do in high school at Ligbron Akademie vir Tegnologie, before being told in Grade IX that it was too dangerous.
So Lee played for the girls team at Hendrina combined school, helping them to win the league, and then Oosterland in Secunda, again steering them to the title, before finally, in her matric year at Ligbron, they started a girls team and they won the league as well. Clearly she was a dominant player, even if she is too modest to say so.
“I actually grew up wanting to play hockey for South Africa, but then at Pukke I only played for the 2nds and after three or four months I stopped all sports and I just played cricket socially for my koshuis. I was studying education and I thought that’s it, I’m going to be a teacher for the rest of my life. Women’s sport was just for the love of the game back then.
“But then in my second year at varsity, Yashin Ebrahim was the national coach and out of the blue he phoned me and asked me to come to a camp. Things happened very quickly after that. I have no idea why he called me, but thank you to Yash and whoever told him about me. Cricket was not professional and I saw no future in it, but now I’m living the dream.
“Now I’m a professional cricketer, travelling and competing in World Cups, just doing the job I love. I wake up and I get to play cricket, even just going to nets or the gym is wonderful. Being out in the middle is my happy place, where I have nothing going on, it’s just me and my cricket and I really enjoy that,” Lee told the Saturday Citizen shortly before her departure for the Caribbean.
Power-hitting is the 26-year-old’s most obvious skill: in a T20 match against India at the Wanderers earlier this year, Lee hit the ball over the covers and halfway up the grass embankment next to the changerooms. The Proteas men played later that day in a double-header and none of them could manage a better strike than that.
Relatively short, but strong, Lee says her ball-striking is a natural talent but she has worked on it over the years.
“It came naturally to me but in the last few years we’ve started using some nettime for just power-hitting, just to see how far we can hit the ball, which is really fun. I never grew up wanting to hit the ball hard, but I just try not to over-think it. See ball, hit ball is my strength.
“Thinking too much about it makes it so difficult, I need to just let go and it’s very important that I mustn’t be thinking about anything else when I’m batting. So I don’t like attention being put on my hitting, at the end of the day I’m just doing my job and I try to forget about everything outside,” Lee said.
That Lee is a global superstar of women’s cricket is shown by her contracts to play over in England for the Surrey Stars in their Super League and for the Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash in Australia.
Her temperament was shown by the fiery century she scored – 104 off just 58 balls – to lead Surrey to victory in the Super League final at the end of August against Loughborough Lightning.
“In my first five games in the Super League I was overthinking things. But it helps to have a hitter at the other end as well and I was fortunate to bat with players like (England star) Nat Sciver, a great calming influence, and Dane van Niekerk, who is one of the best batswomen in T20 cricket.”
With Lee, Van Niekerk, Laura Wolvaardt, Mignon du Preez and Chloe Tryon batting in the top five in the West Indies, the Proteas have a fine chance of ending South Africa’s wretched history at World Cups. For Lee, it is all about taking responsibility.
“You can’t plan when you’re going to score runs, but I do feel a lot of responsibility as a senior batter because 20-over cricket is my strength, even though I prefer 50 overs. I do love T20 though as well, it’s quick and you have to be on the ball for every delivery. There’s also time in T20 cricket, but you just don’t see it.
“You have to know your role though and where your game is, you can’t go to the world cup trying to find your game. Hopefully we can build on the good preparation we had in the Caribbean on our recent tour to the West Indies and we want to make sure we make at least the semi-finals. To do that we must really improve our batting, have partnerships and help our bowlers, as good as they are,” Lee said.