‘Surreal’ Proteas blow Windies away
THE SOUTH African women’s cricket team are moving full steam ahead towards the semifinals of the Women’s World Cup in England.
The Proteas started their campaign with a victory over Pakistan, before their second game against New Zealand was washed out.
Yesterday, though, Dane van Niekerk and her team trashed the current World T20 champions, the West Indies, by 10 wickets.
Among those who congratulated them on Twitter was SA men’s captain AB de Villiers, who said: “What a fantastic performance from the @ProteasWomen!!! Congrats @danevn81 and the girls! Looking good.” “It was quite surreal. If I could script it I would not have written it like that. It was very close to perfect. We knew how destructive the West Indies can be, so we just told the bowlers to stick to their line and lengths,” Van Niekerk said afterwards.
“I’m really proud of the bowlers, especially my two opening bowlers, they were world class.”
WOMEN’S cricket in South Africa wants to be taken seriously. For years they have shouted from the rooftops, but the only way to convince the naysayers were through performances.
There have been fleeting glimpses of maturity, notably reaching the World T20 semifinal in Dhaka back in 2014, but never have they come close to allaying their status as a poor relation.
To its credit Cricket South Africa and its backers Momentum have recently showed some faith by providing the sort of a support a professional sports team requires.
But still the team needed a major scalp to show its progression for people to sit up and take notice. Yesterday, with Leicester’s Grace Road providing the stage to a global audience, Dane van Niekerk’s team put in a performance of such high quality that it even trended on Twitter!
The facts are South Africa thrashed the West Indies by 10 wickets. The current World T20 champions were dismissed for 48 – the sixth lowest in ICC Women’s World Cup history – before the Proteas chased it down in just 6.2 overs. There were 262 balls left in South Africa’s innings – the third-largest win in terms of balls remaining in a completed women’s ODI. – when 18-year-old Parklands College schoolgirl Laura Wolvaardt struck the winning boundary.
It certainly was a busy day for the statisticians. World No 1 ODI bowler Marizanne Kapp returned career-best figures of 4/14 before the medium-pacer’s skipper Van Niekerk became the only bowler in cricket history to take four wickets in an international without conceding a run with her leg-spinners. If you missed it the first time, Van Niekerk’s figures were 3.23-0-4!
The carnage that ensued was all set up by “the fastest bowler in the world” Shabnim Ismail, who accounted for Haley Mathews and Windies skipper Stafanie Taylor. It tore the heart out of the Windies batting and the Caribbean ladies simply had no band-aid for a wound that bled even further when Kapp reduced the Windies to 16/5 in the eighth over.
“It was quite surreal. If I could script it I would not have written it like that. We knew how destructive the West Indies can be, so we just told the bowlers to stick to their line and lengths,” Van Niekerk said of the performance.
Having closed out a tense run-chase against Pakistan in their World Cup opener last week and with the mid-week match against New Zealand abandoned due to rain, the Proteas are unbeaten after three matches in England.
There are bigger challenges that lie ahead with juggernauts like Australia, India and England waiting, but yesterday’s demolition of the 2013 World Cup runners-up should have filled Van Niekerk’s team with the confidence to push through to the semi-finals.
“That’s what we are aiming for,” Kapp said. “Things are finally working for us.”
If you didn’t know who Van Niekerk, Kapp, Ismail or Wolvaardt were before, you definitely know now. Remember their names, and some of their friends like Sune Luus, Lizelle Lee and Mignon du Preez, for you’re going to see much more them going forward …