Tazmin Brits wanted to smash the leather off the ball. But she couldn't find the gears for it when she started in the first T20I against India alongside Laura Wolvaardt .
She scored a match-winning 81 off 56 balls, but if one had watched only the first half of her innings, it would have felt like Brits was playing an ODI, despite it being a batting-friendly surface at Chepauk.
It took her nine balls to get off the mark and she had moved to a run-a-ball 25 at the end of ten overs. At the other end, Wolvaardt was batting freely, and Marizanne Kapp attacked from the get-go. Brits struggled. Against Pooja Vastrakar in the seamer's first over, she swung and missed, she was beaten on a loose drive, she toe-ended a heave to mid-on after charging down, she was beaten outside off while looking to go big. Brits just couldn't get it right.
Having recovered from a knee injury, Brits was playing her first T20I in three months. She had scored 61 runs in the three ODIs earlier in Bengaluru. She missed the one-off Test with an illness. This wasn't going well either, but she managed to "shift the game a bit", and it was possible because of advice from Wolvaardt and Kapp.
"Kappie just said to me: 'you are leaning back, your base isn't strong enough - you maybe should just move your head a bit more forward'," Brits, the Player of the Match, said after the game. "I was feeling like I was doing that, but if you look at the replays, I was leaning back a lot, so it didn't allow me to free my hands. I was tucking myself up a bit, and the same thing with Wolf [Wolvaardt]. She said: 'just stay in there; it's going to come'."
It's one thing to know what the flaw is and quite another to rectify it immediately in a T20 game. But Brits is a fighter.
Six years after she missed the chance to take part in the 2012 London Olympics as a javelin thrower following a road accident, Brits - who has the Olympic rings tattooed on her right biceps - made her T20I debut for South Africa. Twenty-one days before the next Olympics, her resilience was on display again in front of a 12,000-strong crowd, far away from Paris.
At the halfway mark, South Africa were 78 for 1. They scored 111 runs in the last ten overs with 56 of those coming off Brits' bat.
It began with her coming down the track to a flighted delivery from Asha Sobhana and smashing it over long-on for her first six. That was in the 11th over. In the following over, bowled by Radha Yadav, she muscled one over midwicket while maintaining a still base. Then came Vastrakar, who had conceded just three runs in her first two overs, for the 16th. But this time, Brits' power game, married with timing, brought her a one-bounce four over extra cover, and with that, her tenth T20I half-century, off 40 balls.
"We got into a bit of a hole with the ODIs and coming back from a knee injury and not getting runs…" Brits said. "If you don't get runs, you're not doing your job. I tried to hit the ball too hard in the first few overs. I wanted to hit the leather off the ball, maybe send the ball back to South Africa. But I wasn't getting good positions. There's a lot of basic things I should have looked at now that I think about it. But we're human. We struggle. So when you struggle, you got to try to find a way out."
The real fun began after her fifty. That she got a life after being dropped by Richa Ghosh on 50 also helped. But her bat-swing became more refined, evident in the way she tonked Radha for two back-to-back sixes in the 17th over before using her strong wrists to collect two fours off Deepti Sharma in the 18th. This included a reverse hit through to the deep-third boundary.
Then came the final part of the battle between Vastrakar and Brits. In the last over of the innings, Brits crouched low to Vastrakar's bouncer and pulled it behind square while falling over. On the next delivery, the final ball of the innings, Vastrakar got the better of her as she holed out to long-on but not before Brits had notched up her career-best score in the format.
"You got to be fearless. Everyone always says that but to actually do that in a game is always difficult," Brits said. "You fear getting dropped. So you play within yourself. But we've made like a bond between the batters that we're going to go hard no matter what. We have to represent our badge and we have to win the World Cup, so we've got to trust the process.
"It does hurt when India beat us 3-0 [in the ODIs]. But at the end of the day, that's where you rise, and that's where you become champions. Your mentality needs to shift. You can't sit in the corner for too long. If you sit in the corner too long, the game might just go by."
South Africa have won just five of their last 14 completed T20Is. But going by Friday night's evidence, if Brits is consistent with her opening act, she could well be the point of difference at the T20 World Cup in Bangladesh later this year.
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