From Kappie to Dercky: South Africa's pace-bowling allrounder's torch is being passed

Nobody wants to be reminded of one of their worst moment but perhaps Marizanne Kapp won't mind this one:

"It was the 2017 World Cup semi-final and - I don't know if I should say this - there was a picture of Marizanne crying on the floor. I still see that vividly in my head," Annerie Dercksen says. "That's probably the first women's game I've ever watched. And after that, I realised there's women's cricket in South Africa and thought maybe I could also play."

Six years later Dercksen was in the same squad as Kapp and had to pinch herself when she was at breakfast and Kapp was there in the flesh. "In an interview, I said that I could now take water to her on the field and it was just the moment of my life. I'm still like that daily," " Dercksen says.

The hero worship brings out Kapp's sterner side. "Dercky is young. She makes me tired," she says, only half-joking, on the same call. "She is a very playful, busy person. I have to warn her and the other young ones every second night not to have their tea parties or coffee parties close to my room. They must go to the [room of the] person that's furthest away from my room. They like to walk up and down in the corridor at night and make a noise. I'm asleep by then."

Before the casual observation that Kapp, all of 35 years old, is starting to sound like a senior citizen can be made, Dercksen says she would like to jump in and defend herself.

"I'm a little socially awkward," she says. "And obviously with Kappie being my hero, I've got to think when I have to ask her a question. I've got to prepare it, play it in my head first, and then I've got to go up to her. In the last couple of years, it's been getting a bit easier to speak to her.

"I really like her. She wants to pretend that she's more serious than she actually is. There's a little playful side of her that we're going to get out of her. She started taking part in our soccer warm-ups now, which is cool. We've been told off quite a bit for being too loud, but if maybe she can go to bed a bit later, we can invite her to the tea parties."

Is it really tea that's being drunk? "Yes, I had to bring 200 Rooibos bags from South Africa because we can't find them anywhere else," Dercksen says.

Will Kapp consider joining? Probably not, because the badass image she gives off on the field is not a persona; it's who she really is when she's in work mode.

"I get so annoyed with people when they judge me on how I am on the field," she says. "This is my job. I'm not going to smile and laugh when people hit me for six or four. I want to do well. I want to win. So if you are judging me because I'm not smiling on the field, just know that this is competition.

"I'm just very focused, even at training. If we're playing around, or it's not structured, I immediately get so annoyed because I feel like I need to get something out of this training session. I'm not just here to spend time at the field. There has to be a purpose for me, otherwise I'd rather just leave it. I'm just that way in life as well. If I can't do something, I'd rather just leave it. But if I am good at something and I can do something, then I give it 200%."

The tears Dercksen saw in that World Cup semi-final eight years ago serve to illustrate. They came when South Africa, playing on television screens for the first time, pushed hosts and eventual champions England so hard that they came within two balls of winning the match.

They ought to have scored more than 218 for 6 in 50 overs but defended those runs with tenacity. Their last-over defeat left them devastated. Kapp sat alone in the outfield and then used her hands and her shirt to cover her face as she walked off. Though no one expected South Africa, then a relatively unknown force in the women's game and only newly professionalised at international level, to get that far, the team had a quiet belief about them.

"That was probably one of the best teams we ever had," Kapp says. Dercksen could say that she and Kapp played in one of the others: the outfit that reached the T20 World Cup final last year.

That they were favourites to win that match is testament to their growth since Dercksen first watched them; that they didn't win asks questions of both their ability to perform under pressure and their depth. In Dercksen, Kapp sees an opportunity for the side to start to address the latter, especially as her own career enters its twilight phase.

"In South Africa, years ago we never had someone coming in to fill a spot," she says. "If someone left, you almost had to start again, and then you ended up further behind Australia, India and England. Now it's getting easier. Experience is something you can't buy, but it's such a good thing that we have youngsters coming in and they take the field with some of the seniors, and it just speeds up the learning for them. When we started back then, there was none of that."

Kapp has played in eight of Dercksen's 13 ODIs and 16 of her 24 T20Is. She was rested from South Africa's tri-series in Sri Lanka, where Dercksen scored two fifties and her first ODI hundred in six matches (but only bowled 14.5 overs and took two wickets). As someone who came up as a bowling allrounder, Kapp's concern has been with Dercksen's progress in that second department, and it was the focus of their pre-World Cup training camp.

"Kappie gave me a good talking to - not a telling off, she was nice to me and she told me the truth, which is that I haven't been working really hard on my bowling and I need to try and contribute a bit more there," Dercksen says. "My stats probably show that my bowling has been going through a bit of a rough patch lately. Kappie's been telling me that I cannot bowl a different ball every ball, which is probably what I'm trying to do. She said to just try to keep it simple and to understand that I should train in that way and be hard on myself, which I wasn't being."

Since Shabnim Ismail's retirement, South Africa have lacked a certain aggression with ball in hand, and a lot of pace. Dercksen, with her natural athleticism and height, could look to fill that gap but it will take work.

"She's so talented and I don't want to see that go to waste," Kapp says. "So I just told her what I do when I structure my overs when I'm at training: nail your top-of-off-stump ball first, and then move towards working slower balls, yorkers and death bowling. I gave her a bit of advice on how to structure overs in her training so she's a bit more focused."

Whether the results of that will show at this year's World Cup remains to be seen. Dercksen is one of six seam options in a squad that includes Kapp, Ayabonga Khaka, Tumi Sekhukhune, Nadine de Klerk and Masabata Klaas, and she is the least experienced of them. She will also be needed to do a job with the bat in a middle order that can sometimes seem brittle.

Let's not forget that she is only 24 years old, made her debut a little over a year ago, and is playing in her first ODI World Cup. Despite having received recognition - she was the ICC's Emerging Cricketer of the Year in 2024 - Dercksen is still learning her trade. If South Africa are to go far in this tournament, it will likely be because of those who have already travelled the distance, like Kapp.

The 2025 tournament will be Kapp's fifth ODI World Cup Her first ODI, in 2009, was also her first World Cup match, and she has since seen South Africa go from no-hopers to two-time semi-finalists.

"I am a bit sad that I'm this age now because these kids are so blessed with where women's cricket is at the moment," she says. "They can just get better and better and it's just going to get bigger and bigger. The few of us that started way back in 2009 had nothing and played for the love of the sport. It's been hard. I'm not going to lie, it's been tough over the years but I'm extremely blessed to still be sitting here and still playing for South Africa."

Dercksen does not take that history for granted. "We've got it better than they have," she says. "The amount of work they've put in from when they started, and there weren't even contracts… They stayed in places we probably would never stay now. They flew economy. So they did the hard yards for us."

As a thank you, Dercksen and many of her younger tea-party team-mates like Sinalo Jafta would like to give their seniors what they couldn't a year ago. "At the last World Cup, I was more sad for the senior players like Kappie and Chloe [Tryon] and Aya [Khaka] than I was for myself," Dercksen says. "They thoroughly deserve to win a World Cup. If this is Kappie's last one, I'm hoping we can give a little bit of an extra effort to sort of make it special for them. And for the whole of South Africa."

Will it be Kapp's last World Cup? "I don't know. At the next one I'll be 39, so that's a bit far away."

Dercksen, of course, has to have the last word. "I think Kappie still has one more left in her."