Cape Town - Laura Wolvaardt will walk out at Newlands this evening in front of all her family and friends.
It may not seem significant to some, but it means the world to the Proteas Women’s opener for the opportunity does not come around very often.
In fact, despite debuting for the Proteas back in 2016 and playing over 131 matches across formats for her country, she’s only ever played a single international on her home ground with Table Mountain in the background.
And that was last week’s ICC T20 Women’s World Cup opening game defeat to Sri Lanka.
She, and the rest of the entire country, will be hoping for a better result against Bangladesh that will ensure progression to the semi-finals, but Wolvaardt is not allowing the magnitude of the match to sully the occasion for her.
“It’s my home ground at Newlands, so the vibe is going to be incredible and I can’t wait. Obviously, it’s a vital game for us, so we’re just trying to stay really focused on that and just keep focusing on our processes,” Wolvaardt said.
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“I think if anything, the home crowd has helped us a bit. It’s been incredible to be out there with the atmosphere we’ve gotten at some of the games to have thousands of people cheering when we were scoring runs or taking wickets.
“I think it’s helped us quite a bit. I think obviously being the host nation, there’s always a little bit of extra pressure. But for me personally, it was really special to have all of my family and friends in the crowd.
“I think the last game didn’t go exactly how we liked, but we’re just going to stick to our plans and hopefully we can execute them better. It’s going to be great to have the home crowd behind us.”
Wolvaardt has been shy of runs thus far in the tournament since returning to her preferred opening slot. She feels that it’s more to do with execution that her batting position - even though her overall statistics suggest otherwise.
It is unlikely that the team management, headed by coach Hilton Moreeng and captain Sune Luus, will make such a bold call at this late stage of the tournament to move Wolvaardt back to the middleorder.
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It is therefore a case of simply getting the job done, wherever she may find herself in the batting line-up, because the rest of the unit have not fired collectively as yet either.
“I think obviously, we haven’t really hit our straps. I don’t think it’s necessarily our plans that are wrong. I think we’ve just lacked execution in some of the games,” Wolvaardt said.
“We’re trying to speak about having that intent when we’re batting and to keep rotating and looking to score. I think we have the talent and we just need to stay calm and execute and we’ll come right.
“I think I’ve been an opener for most of my life. I open in ODIs and it goes pretty well for me.
“So, I think the plan initially when they moved me down was always that I was going to sort of open one day when I was ready and sort of had developed my skills enough to move back.
“I think we have a lot of really great batters who are really good in the middle. So, I didn’t mind the change at all.”
Newlands will host a doubleheader today with England and Pakistan starting at 3pm before the Proteas face Bangladesh at 7pm.