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Cape Town - The Proteas women are gearing up for their first official appearance in the ICC Women’s World T20 on Friday where they will take on three-time defending champions, Australia in Nagpur.
The Proteas entered the tournament on a high after they had clinched a 2-1 T20 series win against the West Indies in Cape Town earlier this month. After that, they suffered two warm-up match defeats, by nine wickets against the TNCA City Juniors and by seven wickets against England in Chennai.
Coach, Hilton Moreeng does not believe that the warm-up match results are a true reflection of where the team is and is quietly confident that they will peak at the right times in this tournament.
“For us it was important to acclimatise to the conditions in India as quickly as we could,” he said. “In the warm-up games, we gave everyone a run in order to give them an idea of what the conditions are like and what they are to expect. Luckily for us, we were not presented with anything that we did not expect. The conditions played to what we know, for us as a team, it’s more about executing our skills and adapting as quickly as possible. The two warm-ups have given us a good idea of what to expect, the preparation has gone accordingly and we feel that we are ready for tomorrow.
In both warm-up matches, South Africa just passed the 100-run mark in their total scores, notching 104 against TCA and 101 against England. Moreeng believes that there is always room for improvement, but batting is not as a big an area of concern as most would think in these conditions.
“I think as a team, we have definitely shown signs of improvement,” he continued. “There is always room to do better, but I think that overall, the skills execution has been much better. It’s just disappointing that the results of the warm-up games went that way, but we can’t look too much into that because we know we are a better side than that. The batters have had a bit of time in the middle and a lot of time in the nets, so I feel that we are well prepared for tomorrow’s game.”
Taking on three-time defending champions, Australia will be a big ask for South Africa, but Moreeng believes his side is ready.
“Every game in the World Cup is a big game. We will take them all one match at a time. Our preparation going into the match against Australia has been thorough and in a T20 game, anything can happen, it will boil down to the team who apply their basics the best winning the game.”
South Africa’s match begins at 19:30 local time, 16:00 CAT.
