Nkwe adopts long-term strategy to improve Proteas women’s team

Enoch Nkwe is optimistic that Cricket South Africa (CSA) can get the Proteas women’s team back on track by adopting a long-term outlook focusing on next year’s T20 Women’s World Cup and the 50-over World Cup in 2025. 

Confusion reigned ahead of the team’s first assignment after the run to the T20 World Cup final in February, with a 15-player squad named on Friday that didn’t contain a captain and with Hilton Moreeng restored to the head coaching role in an interim capacity.

“Our role is to ensure the team continues to perform at a high standard and that is not about the short term, it is about the long term,” said CSA's director cricket.

That broader view includes the appointment of a new coach in January ahead of the Proteas’s big assignment against the ever-dominant Australians, a tour that will include a Test match.

“We need to create something sustainable that lasts beyond that tour because we have World Cups in the next two years,” he said. 

Talks with a prospective new captain, understood to be Laura Wolvaardt, were still being conducted over the weekend, a most unusual task to undertake just days before a tour. Besides the initial release last Friday about the squad not containing the identity of captain, it also didn’t spell out why Sune Luus had stepped away from the position or if she was forced.

It later emerged she had chosen to do so to “focus on her cricket”, and that apparently it was always understood she would no longer be captain for the new season, although that had not been publicly mentioned at any point in the six months since the World Cup. 

Nkwe said in his one-on-one conversations with players after that tournament it was clear many were not happy with the environment in the team. Privately, many of the senior players have expressed a need to move on from Moreeng, who had occupied the position for 11 years. 

Although the players like him and respect the role he played in improving the team in the professional era, there is a sense that a new voice is needed in the dressing room, particularly in a period where the team is going through a transition, after the retirements of a number of greats of the last decade. 

Senior players like Wolvaardt, Marizanne Kapp and Chloe Tryon — who asked not be considered for the Pakistan trip — have been exposed to different coaching methods in various franchise leagues in which they regularly participate, and despite SA’s run to the final of the T20 World Cup there is a sense that the Proteas are falling behind the bigger nations like Australia, India and England. 

Nkwe addressed criticism that CSA was laboured in its handling of concerns raised by players despite having six months in which to make changes. “There was a lot that needed to be addressed and many of the players were away in different parts of the world, in various leagues.” 

Wolvaardt, Kapp, Tryon and Nadine de Klerk have all been involved in The Hundred in England, which finishes at the weekend, although only Tryon’s team, the Southern Brave, are involved in the playoffs of that competition.

CSA will launch a new professional women's league on Tuesday. At the same event, the captain for the Pakistan tour will also officially be announced.