The future looks bright

Cri-Zelda Brits

I can’t believe we are already in June and the first ball of the ICC Women’s World Cup is only nine months away. We have recently completed our first training camp and it was great to be back together as a team for the first time since winning the World Cup qualifier in Stellenbosch in February.

There was a great spirit among the team and there was a lot of focus not just on our upcoming tour of England, where all the girls can’t wait for the opportunity to play at Lord’s for the first time, but on how we can get the best out of the squad ahead of the two major ICC events next year.

These training camps are really important for us as there isn’t a huge opportunity to play national competitions in South Africa – one of the main challenges is that as the country is so big and the players aren’t full-time, which makes travelling to matches a real issue.

So while we do have a regular 50-over competition, which will serve as our main domestic warm-up to the ICC Women’s World Cup, we do suffer from not playing as much cricket as other countries.

There are also plans to introduce a new domestic competition for Twenty20 cricket, based on the Super Fours model in England. This is a really positive step and yet another sign of support from Cricket South Africa, who have been great to the team since they took over the running of the women’s game a few years ago.

We are lucky to have a very talented squad of players, who, if they offer everything that they did to be at the Women’s World Cup Qualifier, have a chance of competing with the very best.

Not many of my squad have had the opportunity to play in English conditions before, so this will be a great learning experience. The performances of Olivia Anderson in Stellenbosch earlier in the year, after spending a summer in Ireland, are testament to the improvements it can make to an individual’s game.

I know that my game really improved after playing a summer of cricket in England, where I was lucky enough to play alongside Charlotte Edwards, so I hope that we can all use the experience wisely.

The lifestyle challenges of playing women’s cricket for your country, knowing that you have to fit in training around work, mean that there is a chance you may lose some of your most talented players. It was a big blow for us when Johmari Logtenberg retired, especially after all the time and effort we had spent on her development and the promise she had shown at such a young age.

To protect our side against losing quality players, we need to improve the strength and depth in our squad, which hopefully the new domestic Twenty20 competition will help provide, as well as increase the number of people playing at a grass-roots level.

South Africa is a proud sporting country so we know one of the ways we can increase our profile is by winning – we get far more coverage at home as a result of winning the Women’s World Cup Qualifier than we ever did before.

So that is why all the squad are determined to put in as much hard work as possible to ensure we can benefit from being in the spotlight at the World Cup and the World Twenty20 next year and take women’s cricket in South Africa from strength to strength.