Women’s cricket needs a countrywide network

While they have support from Momentum, local structures need to be developed

Women’s cricket in South Africa will continue to be backed by financial services company Momentum, but even with that, the creation of stronger provincial structures remains imperative.

Momentum, which has sponsored the women’s Proteas for a decade, and Cricket SA are in the final stages of negotiations to extend the deal providing a major fillip for the sport, after Sune Luus’ team generated considerable excitement during their run to the final of the T20 World Cup last month.

Both parties expected a positive outcome to the talks and, once concluded, attention will switch back to the work CSA has to do to create a proper development pipeline for the women’s game.

CSA’s director of cricket Enoch Nkwe recently told TimesLIVE the World Cup had shifted the needle for provincial administrators for whom an understanding of and support for women’s cricket was lacking.

“It’s amazing, you can talk a lot, but until people actually see it, they don’t really grasp how professional this sport really is. Members were hosting the teams for warm-up matches and training sessions at schools and some of the smaller club grounds and I must say it gave them a better understanding of the game,” said Nkwe.

He expects the next few months to be busy in terms of creating the necessary structures. There are currently two main provincial competitions for women: the 50over Women’s Provincial League and the CSA Women’s Provincial T20 League.

To improve domestic standards, CSA has created a Super League tournament every December, where some of the national contracted players are involved, but even so there is too little cricket to broaden the base locally and to ensure crucial match time for young players in particular.

While understandably there were calls for a Women’s SA20 competition, which would be an important component of raising the status of the sport, the establishment thereof is not as easy as Graeme Smith — the SA20 commissioner — waving a magic wand and making it so.

It has to be a fundamentally South African competition, with the majority of players hailing from this country and right now there simply aren’t sufficient numbers of players capable of filling enough teams to make it competitive and of a good enough quality.

The kind of pipeline that exists in the men’s game — going from schools, to clubs, then provinces and ending with the national team — doesn’t exist in the women’s game. Unlike hockey, netball or the individual sports like athletics and swimming, there is very little structured girls cricket at school level.

“That is perhaps one area where the World Cup would have played a significant part, in showing girls that there is a career path for them in playing the sport. The problem is of course that there are so few structures at school level and there are challenges, like for instance getting coaches at schools,” said the CEO of the SA Cricketers Association, Andrew Breetzke.

A lot of money has flowed into the women’s game in recent years. The Proteas players each walked away with about R500,000 for their exploits at the World Cup

— made up of prize money and fees from image rights.

Beyond that however are the opportunities to earn contracts in the three biggest franchise leagues in the world: the Women’s Premier League in India, The Hundred in England and the Big Bash League in Australia.

For a player like Marizanne Kapp, who picked up a R3.2m contract in the WPL and has had deals in the other two competitions, she can live comfortably without playing for the Proteas.

However, she is one of just three South African players who are contracted in all three of those tournaments along with Shabnim Ismail and Laura Wolvaardt.

Most of the attention for those leagues is earned through performances at international level, which is why it is critical for the Proteas to remain competitive, for the team to get the necessary corporate support and for CSA to strengthen the structures that feed the national team.

That is perhaps one area where the World Cup would have played a significant part, in showing girls that there is a career path for them in playing the sport