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Moreeng hopes to close women's cricket gap, optimistic over future: 'It's a progress' Proteas coach Hilton Moreeng says Cricket South Africa (CSA) is looking at closing the gap in the women's cricket pipeline ahead of a busy summer. With injuries and retirements, Moreeng and his side have had to experiment, which resulted in a poor showing against England and the Commonwealth Games. This year, South Africa dealt with the sudden retirement of star batters Lizelle Lee and Mignon du Preez.

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And with several of their senior players in their 30s, the SA women are looking to usher in a new generation. South Africa only return to international cricket in January, where they take on India and West Indies in a tri-series before hosting the T20 Women's World Cup. The Proteas and an extended high-performance squad of 25 are in East London for a training camp from 1-10 November ahead of South Africa hosting the U19 Women's World Cup and T20 World Cup. Moreeng insists they're trying to introduce more players into the national system and hope to strengthen their pipeline. We saw in England some of the youngsters we've thrown in and we tried different combinations that we were not used to," Moreeng told reporters on Tuesday. "Yes, the results didn't go away, but the bigger picture for us was that some of the youngsters could experience how it feels to play against the best. And when you're given the opportunity in a role to do in a team and some of them went back and worked extremely hard, or only they came back as different cricketers. "So it's one of those we're looking at going into the World Cup. We have an opportunity now in December for the Women's Super League to play in Cape Town, where selectors will be looking at strength versus strength teams, and they've been exposing the different roles and see progress heading into our World Cup. "Yes, there's opportunities and there are a lot of youngsters coming through and for us, as a pipeline. The more time they spend with players at the higher level, the better for their cricket." Moreeng argues that while there's nothing they can do about the gap in women's cricket, training camps and game time are the only ways to help the new talent coming through. "You can't replace them. They're unique players and are special talent and you're looking for players that can be the best that they can be," said Moreeng. "When you speak about closing the gap, the gap will always be big because of the challenges you find in women's cricket and I think on top of that, how are we trying to close it? "By inviting players to these high-performance camps and having emerging and under 19s in these training camps. That is where you can exploit them and expose them to the level above that they're not used to, so it's a process." During the England tour, Lee's absence in the top order was felt and Moreeng says it's always going to be hard to find dynamic and experienced players. "If you want to replace like-for-like Lizelle Lee, it's not every day you're going to get those kinds of players walking around," he continued. "So by talent identification and through the processes that we have, we try our best to make sure that we can best close the gap, and the only way to is to have ongoing continuous games and they need to play more cricket.













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