Tag: Mysore

The name’s Kapp. Marizanne Kapp …

“If we want to grow women’s cricket more Tests are needed, because it’s out there where you can try things and learn so much about yourself.” – Marizanne Kapp

Telford Vice | Cape Town

MARIZANNE Kapp doesn’t consider herself a Test player. She doesn’t see colour. She doesn’t enjoy multi-tasking. She doesn’t see why women shouldn’t be in whites at the highest level. If you need a myth busted, it doesn’t take much to see why you should give the job to South Africa’s premier allrounder.

Kapp spent almost four-and-a-half hours at the crease in Taunton on Monday facing 213 balls and scoring 150 — the best performance by a woman for South Africa and the best by a woman’s No. 6 — on the first day of the one-off Test against England. Her batting meant a first innings that had shambled to 45/4 when she took guard, and then slipped to 89/5, survived and prospered long enough to reach 284.

And yet, just last week, Kapp didn’t think she deserved a place in the XI. “I’ve been working hard on my white-ball game,” she told a press conference after stumps on Monday. “When I played that warm-up game the other day I was like, ‘I shouldn’t be playing Test cricket.’ Because I was playing a T20. If you forget about the colour of the ball that’s coming towards you, it helps a lot. If you focus too much on the ball and the fact that it’s a Test match you end up getting out. That’s the mistake I made in the warm-up game. I left balls that were there to drive.”

Kapp faced eight balls for a duck in the first innings against England A at Arundel Castle, and scored 34 off 28 in the second dig. It was the 485th match of a career that has spanned almost 18 years, but only her third game that involved a second innings. All of the others had been limited overs fixtures.

The paucity of red-ball cricket didn’t help Kapp prepare for her second Test, but it hasn’t stopped her from becoming a dependable player with bat and ball. Reluctantly, it seems: “At times it’s so difficult to focus on both bowling and batting; I feel like one always takes preference. But I’ve been working with some special coaches and the confidence is growing.” 

Kapp was instrumental in South Africa reaching the semi-finals at the World Cup in New Zealand in March, when she scored 203 runs and took a dozen wickets in eight matches. She is ninth on the all-time list of wicket-takers in ODIs, behind only Shabnim Ismail among South Africans, and also second to Ismail in T20Is. But Kapp’s serious, calm presence on the field is at least as valuable as anything she does that keeps the scorers busy. That, she said, was part of her coping mechanism: “If I focus on the other batter it seems to take the pressure off me. That happened throughout the World Cup. When I give advice I forget the situation we are in and it helps me focus more.”

Kapp’s first experience of two-innings cricket was in an under-19 match between Eastern Province and Free State in Durban in December 2008. She took 4/8 and 3/5 in EP’s 89-run win. It would be almost another six years before she wore whites and played with a red ball — on her Test debut against India in Mysore in November 2014. She went wicketless for 27 in 16 overs and was trapped in front second ball by Rajeshwari Gayakwad. “My first Test was an absolute nightmare,” Kapp said.

Even so, she wasn’t put off the format: “You have to focus longer. It’s still cricket. Yes, it’s challenging. But if you take it ball by ball and session by session, it makes it easier.” Part of her motivation, no doubt, is the imperative to remind us that not only men play all forms of the game: “If we want to grow women’s cricket even more [women’s Tests are] definitely needed, because it’s out there where you can try things and learn so much about yourself. I would like to see women play more Tests. It will be good for the game.”

Good for the whole game, she didn’t have to say.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Test cricket is a woman’s game

“Just like ODI and T20 cricket for women, women’s Test cricket needs to be appreciated in its own right and not compared to the men’s game.” – Mignon du Preez

Telford Vice | Cape Town

WHAT’S the sound of one hand clapping? Mignon du Preez isn’t a Zen Buddhist, so she doesn’t use koan riddles to free her consciousness from the constraints of logic. But she has a decent idea of the answer to that question.

Du Preez has scored 13 centuries — including an undefeated 203 — in her 542 senior matches for provinces, franchises and South Africa. As an under-13 she made 258 in a 40-over interprovincial match, 196 of them in fours and sixes. Even so, the 102 she made against India in Mysore in November 2014 was unlike any of her other successes.

“India declared on 400, so I knew we would need big partnerships and that a couple of our batters would need to score big runs if we wanted a chance at chasing India’s total down,” Du Preez told Cricbuzz. “I think the biggest change for me was probably my mindset. I was a lot more patient at the crease and I wanted to bat time. However, if I could do it over again, I would definitely want to improve my strike rate.”

She batted for a mite more than four-and-a-half hours and faced 253 balls: a not exactly Bairstowesque strike rate of 40.32. That wasn’t why so few pairs of hands applauded Du Preez’ feat — there weren’t many hands at the Gangothri Glades ground in the first place, and no pairs of eyeballs watching from home. 

“To score my maiden Test hundred in my debut Test, as captain, was really special; probably the ultimate dream Test experience,” Du Preez said. “Unfortunately at that time there was not big support for women’s cricket, so it was only in front of my teammates without the excitement of hearing the fans roar or even family being able to watch it at home as it was not televised or streamed back then. However, I am really blessed that I had the opportunity to experience the ‘pinnacle format of cricket’, as it’s referred to in the male cricket environment.”

That innings was special, and not just for Du Preez. In all of Test cricket only David Houghton has also scored a century on debut and as captain — 121 against India in Harare in October 1992; Zimbabwe’s inaugural Test. Du Preez might take comfort from the fact that Houghton’s strike rate was 37.57. There are many differences between the two players. One of them is that Houghton played 22 Tests while that match almost eight years ago was Du Preez’ first and last in the format, and her only first-class game.

Du Preez, who retired from Tests and ODIs in April, provided written answers to questions for this piece while she was on holiday in Greece. Good luck getting other male former Test captains or centurions or indeed players to do that. Unless, of course, money is involved. There isn’t a lot of it in the women’s game. What there is has been sunk into white-ball cricket, which has earned a place in the public consciousness not because it deserves to be there — which it does undeniably — but because administrators, broadcasters and sponsors have recognised its potential as a revenue source.

Women’s Test cricket? Not so much, not least because it is rare. The Mysore match was South Africa’s last before the game against England in Taunton, which started on Monday. It is the 144th women’s Test. Some 400 kilometres to the north and also on Monday the other England team beat New Zealand by seven wickets in men’s cricket’s 2,467th Test. The equations are less skewed in the white-ball formats: there have been 4,418 men’s ODIs and 1,280 women’s, and 1,580 men’s T20Is compared to 1,152 women’s. Men have played 94.48% of all Tests — partly because they had a head start of more than 57 years on women — and 77.54% of all ODIs, but only, relatively, 55.24% of T20Is. “Unfortunately I think it’s easier to market the shorter format of the game as it’s a lot more exciting and appealing to the fans,” Du Preez said. 

Did that mean she thought Test cricket wasn’t all it’s routinely cracked up to be? You have read and heard, many times, something similar to Du Preez’ reply: “Look, Test cricket is not called Test cricket for no reason. You will get tested in all aspects of the game. However, I think we will have more appreciation for Test cricket the more we have an opportunity to play it.” Or at least be given the chance to play two-innings cricket more often. Currently, that doesn’t happen at all for women in South Africa. “Yes, I think it will help if they get an opportunity to play the longer format on a regular basis.”

The alternative would be to consider Test cricket purely a man’s game. “No, I don’t think we need to accept that,” Du Preez said. “Just like ODI and T20 cricket for women, women’s Test cricket needs to be appreciated in its own right and not compared to the men’s game.”

There’s a hint of swing there, a gentle admonition of the mentality that sees, before it sees anything else, that boundaries are shorter for a women’s game, that despite that they are not often cleared, and that no female bowlers are fast, even if that is how they are described. Many who can’t stop themselves from thinking those thoughts didn’t think, when they changed the channel from the Taunton Test to see how Emma Raducanu was getting on in her first-round match against Alison Van Uytvanck at Wimbledon on Monday, that they would be short-changed because they wouldn’t be able to watch more than three sets.

The deeper, darker question is whether people of a certain age and outlook extoll the virtues of Test cricket so much and so overtly because, unlike ODIs and T20Is and like an old-fashioned gentleman’s club, it doesn’t often involve women. That view is enabled by the fact that only Test cricket played by women is denoted as such. If it’s labelled “Test cricket” it isn’t explained that it’s men who are playing. It doesn’t need to be because, as we all know, or should know, that’s the norm. 

And yet it’s the format, not the gender of those playing, that determines the level of complexity, drama and nuance on display. It’s simply Test cricket because, simply, it’s Test cricket, not because men are playing it. So if we disclaim some matches as “women’s Tests” we should do the same for “men’s Tests”. Or, better yet, remove the apologetic gender specific simper that says, in effect, “We’re calling this Test cricket, but …”

Marizanne Kapp’s 150 at Taunton on Monday, the highest score by a No. 6 in a women’s Test and the highest by any South African woman, is no less an accomplishment because it wasn’t achieved by a man. Indeed, that she was able to perform as she did even though women play so few Tests is a powerful argument to the contrary. Strike rate? A healthy 70.42.

Happily, there were thousands of pairs of hands in attendance to give voice to those truths. But in the silence that followed the applause there was time and space for a more sobering thought: how many fine innings might we have seen from Kapp and Du Preez had South Africa been deemed worthy of playing more than two Tests in almost eight years?

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Testing time for lesser spotted South Africa

“It’s about longer concentration, and it’s more taxing on the body and the mind.” – Hilton Moreeng on turning white-ball players into a Test team.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

HOW do you prepare a team for a match in a format they hardly ever play? Hilton Moreeng, the coach of the South Africa side who will start a rare women’s Test against England in Taunton on Monday, smiled at the question.  

When South Africa last played a Test the No. 1 song in the US was Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off”. On the first day of the match, but more than 15,000 kilometres away in New Orleans, Solange Knowles — Beyoncé’s younger sister — married Alan Ferguson. Who? Nevermind: they separated five years later. Or before South Africa had played another Test. Yes, their drought has outlived marriages. Since the women were last in whites, against India in Mysore in November 2014, South Africa’s men have played 65 Tests.   

Only five of Moreeng’s squad of 15 have played first-class cricket, all in Tests; earning six caps in all. Or the same number won by Moreeng alone during his days as a wicketkeeper for Free State’s first-class side in the early 2000s.

With 37 first-class caps, which are also Test caps, England’s squad are six times more seasoned than their opponents. Their most recent match in the format wasn’t almost eight years ago but in January. This year. Not that England have been lurching from one Test to the next. They have played five since South Africa’s most recent; four against Australia, one against India, all but one of them drawn.

Australia and England played the first women’s Test at the Exhibition Ground in Brisbane in December 1934. One or both of those teams have been involved in 173 of the 290 women’s Tests yet played: almost 60%. New Zealand, India, South Africa and West Indies have played 107. Men played 238 Tests before women made their debut. The current Headingley Test between England and New Zealand is the 2,467th between men’s teams — eight-and-a-half times as many as women have played.

South Africa will go into Monday’s match having featured in 173 white-ball internationals since a handful of their players last pulled on a pair of whites. Small wonder Moreeng said they were struggling to adjust. “The ones battling currently are our batters, because we’ve just come from a white-ball competition against Ireland [earlier this month, when South Africa played three matches in each format],” Moreeng told a press conference on Thursday. “What has helped is the prep we had prior to the Ireland tour; a three-day and four-day game where we introduced most of them to the format. The bowlers have adapted much better.

“We know that, in the other two formats, you can build partnerships. But in this one you need to take it session by session. It’s about longer concentration, and it’s more taxing on the body and the mind. Technically players need to be sound. Everyone is starting to understand, and they’re excited to see how it goes.”

South Africa completed their Test preparations in a drawn three-day game against England A at Arundel that ended on Thursday. The star of the visitors’ first innings of 301 was opener Laura Wolvaardt, who batted for more than three-and-a-half hours and faced 148 balls to reach 101, whereupon she retired. That Wolvaardt succeeded will not surprise those familiar with her textbook technique and solid temperament, but it remains astounding that she should reel off a century in her first senior representative two-innings match. In the same innings Lara Goodall scored 51 and Suné Luus made 48. Wolvaardt and Goodall shared a stand of 116. All told in their first innings, the South Africans batted for almost five hours and faced 489 balls. Wolvaardt’s opening partner, Andrie Steyn, and Luus scored half-centuries in a second innings of 325/9 declared that lasted for almost five-and-a-half hours and 535 deliveries. 

That was enough to nurture hope in Moreeng: “How batters set up their innings, taking their time and showing application, wasn’t there in the preparation matches that we had. We are very happy to see that on the back of white-ball cricket. Most of our batters have spent time in the middle to be able to understand what’s required.”

As for the bowlers: “They need to make sure they can manage the excessive swing they get with the Duke ball on these pitches, and also the lengths they have to adapt to. They need patience around setting up batters and working towards a plan.”

There were eight South Africa debutants in that 2014 Test. There could be 10 in Taunton on Monday. The only squad survivors from Mysore are Trisha Chetty, Marizanne Kapp, Lizelle Lee and Chloe Tryon. Maybe that’s no bad thing considering South Africa lost by an innings. “We were well in the game, then we lost concentration as a unit after tea and that’s when we lost the match,” Moreeng said, a reference to South Africa losing 6/25 on the second day. “It shows what a lack of concentration can do. We need to make sure that everyone understands the discipline required in this game and how you need to stay focused and stay on the button because every session is critical. We need to make sure we stay focused and competitive in every session.”

Not only to perform well but to refute, with deeds, not words, Dean Elgar’s assertion in April: “It’s a man’s environment when it comes to playing at this level.”

First published by Cricbuzz.

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