INTERVIEW
Follow UsAsk Sachin Tendulkar, and he will tell you what it’s like to weigh the entire nation on your shoulders. It is easy to attain legendary status but not easy to maintain one. Even the smallest of failures are scrutinised microscopically.
So much so that you end up forgetting why you took the sport up in the first place. It makes you forget that you are, after all, a human and, like most humans, ‘vulnerable’.
But that’s where Marizanne Kapp is different. She’s into her 15th year of international cricket, but she isn’t afraid to project that vulnerability.
Over the last two years, Kapp’s entire world has been turned upside down. It all kicked off when her partner Dane van Niekerk, who was leading the Proteas side, was dropped from the squad altogether after she failed to complete a two-kilometre run in the minimum required time. This took Kapp to a dark place, where she was mentally in dismay.
That, coupled with injuries, almost broke Kapp totally, but the all-rounder used that bit of vulnerability to her advantage, seeking blessings from the Lord to overturn her situation. It helped her rekindle her love for cricket, especially when her whole life was turned upside down.
“It's probably been the toughest period of my career. I had a lot of things going on off the field, but the love for the game, cricket has always been the place I go-to to get away from struggles or whatever's happening in my life,” Marizanne Kapp told Cricket.com in an exclusive chat.
“And then also, my faith really pulled me through. I was blessed enough to have our team doctor with us on tour, who's also a Christian and she gave me a lot of guidance and helped me through the last period. And I think I probably played my best cricket as well, even though I was really struggling mentally,” she added.
While all eyes in this T20WC would be on India, Australia and England, it would be a cardinal sin to forget that South Africa pack a heavy punch. In the 2023 edition of the Women’s T20 World Cup, the Sune Luus-led Proteas setup punished everyone who took their side lightly and made it all the way to the final.
You’d assume they had everything going their way throughout last year’s tournament, but Kapp disagrees to a level where she says they achieved all of this without even playing their ‘best cricket’ in the group stages. Since then, however, the sky has been the side’s limit.
“I think we have grown so much as a group. We know and are aware of the holes that the people that retired left within our squad, but we've been working really hard to better ourselves, and hopefully, we can still put up a good fight this World Cup,” she had to add.
But more than South Africa, all eyes would be on Kapp because, over the years, her powers with the bat and the ball have both grown multifold. Even then, for some odd reasons, the first thing that strikes people when you talk about the 34-year-old is her new ball bowling.
In just the last two years, Kapp has been one of the most sought-after players in league cricket worldwide, be it in Australia, India or England. While people have mostly talked about her bowling abilities, Kapp has silently let her bat do the talking.
Since the start of 2023, Kapp has amassed 486 runs in the shortest format for the Proteas team; her strike rate of 131 is the third-best in the entire setup, behind Chloe Tyron and Annerie Derecksen, who have all been used as finishers in comparison to Kapp, who bats in the top four.
What makes the fact that people don’t talk about her batting even more shocking is that she’s one of the only three South Africans to have scored 1000 T20 runs (since 2022) while maintaining a strike rate of 120. The other two on that list are Lizelle Lee (retired) and Tyron (finisher).
So, what has Kapp done differently to make people look up to her batting displays?
“I think it's more probably a confidence thing and then just backing myself. For the past two years, I've been really working hard on getting into good positions, getting my head into good positions, and working a lot on the basics,” Kapp said candidly.
“I've always been a person that loved working on the basics. I think it's more of a confidence thing. As I get older, you learn more about your game, you know what your capabilities are, and I back myself.”
But even then, there’s still that raw honesty on Kapp’s part to reveal that she still hasn’t aced T20 batting.
“With T20 cricket, I've always felt like I'm not too sure how to structure my innings yet, and I think I'm starting to learn that, and that's why I've probably been performing a little bit better with a bat in T20 cricket,” she added.
Batting or bowling, the game's name isn’t too different when it comes to Kapp, who believes that a confident person can ace it all. That being said, though, over the last two years, in the national setup, the South African management have been careful about managing her workload to the extent that she’s played most of the ODIs as a specialist batter.
Across her last 20 ODI appearances, Kapp has hardly bowled, bowling just 104 overs, but has amassed a staggering 836 runs with the bat, showing her consistency with a high average of 59.71.
“I've had a few niggles here and there, which has kept me out of bowling, so I always feel so underprepared. Even now, I'm slowly coming back from a niggle I had, so I'm actually not bowling the balls and having the preparation that I would like to have,” she opened up on why the Proteas carefully managed her workload.
However, a lioness will never ‘forget how to hunt’ no matter how old he is or how long they haven’t done that.
“I think it's just that trust and just knowing that even though I couldn't do the work now in the last couple of years, I have bowled a million balls, so I am experienced. It's just going back to those basics, and even when you're bowling or batting or whatever, when you bowl so many balls, and you've played for such a long time, you start to figure out and realise the ball that doesn't go your way, that you don't feel like when you reach your line and length,” she added.
She did not spend most of last month finding her line or length; it was all about Kapp finding rhythm, a word used extensively by both bowlers and top-level athletes.
In the last three years, from a franchise cricket perspective, Kapp has primarily been used as a weapon of destruction in the powerplay, which shows in the wickets tally—31—while only giving runs at 5.2 per over. It is no shock that the franchises want to front-load her bowling when the field restrictions are in play, sheerly due to her ability to put the best of batters under immediate pressure.
Almost 54% of her wickets have come in the powerplay, and nearly 58% of her overs have been when the field restriction is on, inducing a staggering 24.4% false shots from the batters.
“I feel like in league cricket, teams prefer to have me with the new ball so that I can strike and try and get the opposition on the back foot because usually, in the leagues, all the top orders are loaded with big names, so my main job there would be to try and strike with the new ball and get them under pressure straight away, so yeah, it's been a bit different bowling in the middle and death,” she spoke about her new-ball bowling skills.
However, things could shape very differently for Kapp in international cricket, where she is forced to work on middle-over and death-over bowling. She has been excellent in the middle overs, using her mean bouncer and a well-disguised slower ball to her advantage (13 wickets @24.2).
On the contrary, the South African all-rounder hardly bowled at the death (43.2 overs), where she has scalped 14 wickets, mainly because teams have opted to bowl her out in the powerplay.
“I've just started with that [bowling in middle and death] again, it's something I've not been doing because I've been used like that in leagues, and it's tough when you spend so much time on your batting, fielding and bowling and then to add another,” the all-rounder spoke openly about the challenges of learning new skillsets in such a schedule.
“I've always bowled in the death and in the middle throughout my career, but sometimes it just becomes a little bit harder because now when you are training, it's not only your batting skills you have to worry about or your fielding, now it's new ball bowling, middle overs bowling and death bowling, so it just sometimes becomes a bit hard to work on all those skills at one time, especially someone like me who's just been travelling and playing the whole time,” she added.
In the same period, she’s played almost 86 T20s, ranging from her appearances for the Oval Invincibles, the Delhi Capitals, Perth Scorchers, Sydney Thunders and the South African national team. She hardly has time off-season to sharpen the other tools in the shed.
“I have, for example, not been able to work on death bowling or whatever may be the case. It's [work] basically what happens on tour, so it would be nice just to have a block of downtime where you work on specifics. But I also feel like the more I play, the better I get, so I don't really want to stop playing and being competitive, being used to playing high-pressure games,” she opened up candidly.
Kapp’s assignment at this year’s World Cup will be very different; she’s no longer one of the senior players but by far the senior-most player in the squad. That comes with its own responsibilities, including mentoring the up-and-coming stars and being in the ear of the captain, who is always talking about strategy.
While there are different ways of dealing with it, Kapp wants the likes of Annerie Dercksen and Nadine de Klerk to wade their way through the pressure of international cricket. But rest assured that Kapp, the mentor, will always be there around the corner.
South Africa might have reached the final last time, but that doesn’t guarantee them anything, as all teams start afresh. The experienced all-rounder reckons that this could be the ‘closest T20 World Cup’ that one could witness in women’s cricket.
“I think look again, it's probably going to be the closest contested World Cup I've been a part of; we've seen how much the subcontinent teams, the likes of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, how they've improved over the last couple of months, so anyone is in with a chance, I think it comes down to who rocks up on the day and who plays the best cricket,” she answered in regards to a prediction.
What remains certain is that Kapp will have to shoulder much responsibility in this South African setup to climb the World Cup mountain. Kapp will seek the comfort of her teammates and the Lord off the field to keep her going through these challenging life passages. On the field, she will do it her way, screaming and yelling loudly in front of the fiercest competitors, almost giving ‘The Hulk’ a run for his money.
(All numbers updated till before the T20 World Cup)
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