‘It’s still a long tournament,’ says Wolvaardt after Aussie loss
· Citizen
The Proteas women got their ICC Women’s T20 World Cup campaign off to a poor start, with a heavy 65-run loss to Australia in their tournament opener in Manchester on Saturday, but captain Laura Wolvaardt is still confident of their chances.
It will be an uphill battle for the team as they find themselves in the group of death along with the Aussie favourites, 50-over World Cup holders India, as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh who are tricky teams to deal with.
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It means that this opening loss has left them with no more chances to mess up, as only the top two teams from the group make it into the semifinals.
Against the Aussies the Proteas bowlers were up and down, as they took regular wickets but also couldn’t turn the screw when in strong positions which allowed them to reach 172/8, which proved to be far too much as they could only manage 107 all out in response.
“It was a tough day. I think restricting them to that score was not too bad. But obviously we lost our way a bit with the bat. So it was a disappointing loss, they bowled really well and they outplayed us in the end,” admitted Wolvaardt after the match.
“I thought that score was okay. Maybe a little bit above par, but it could have been a lot worse. So we backed ourselves to chase it down, but we struggled to get any momentum in the innings.”
Some bowlers produced great efforts, with Nonkululeko Mlaba, 2/22, and Nadine de Klerk, 2/35, the stand outs, while on the batting front Wolvaardt struggled in her innings but still top scored with 44 off 39 balls, while De Klerk (25) was the only other batter to get past 20.
Kapp and Ismail
It was however good to see the veteran pace duo of Marizanne Kapp and Shabnim Ismail back bowling together in the powerplay, after Ismail came out of retirement for the World Cup, and hopefully they will be able to fire as the tournament progresses.
“It’s awesome to have Shabnim back. It’s been a long time since we’ve had them bowling together in the powerplay like that. So that was awesome to see. We had a couple of other bowlers stepping up, De Klerk and Mlaba bowled pretty well too. So that’s going well at least,” said Wolvaardt.
On her innings she said: “It was hard to get going. It was a frustrating innings. I got stuck on the other end a bit (at the start), and then they bowled pretty well to me later on and closed up my areas. So I struggled to get going and by the time I went out it was quite late already. So I am a bit disappointed with that.”
Looking on to the rest of the tournament Wolvaardt knows her team can fight back, as they did in last year’s 50-over World Cup when they lost heavily to England in their opener but went on to make the final.
“We definitely will (fight back). It is still a long tournament to go. So we will put this game behind us as quickly as we can and move onto the next one.”
The Proteas next take on Pakistan in a must-win clash this coming Wednesday, before fronting up for a monster encounter with India on Sunday.