A year ago, surrounded by a gaggle of hacks enquiring about her brilliance after she’d picked up five awards at Cricket South Africa’s annual prize ceremony, Laura Wolvaardt instead outlined ways she was trying to improve.
She needed to get stronger, go to the gym more and work with her personal batting coach, Laurie Ward, to access more scoring areas. “I can’t just hit cover drives,” she chirped.
Like a bunch of fawning teens a few journos mumbled: “‘Well, don’t go that far, the cover drive is quite nice.’”
Moments of levity from Wolvaardt are rare. She’s a meticulous and hard worker, which in a sense is quite annoying, because she’s also bloody talented ― and not just at batting, or playing cricket in general.
She can do anything she puts her mind to. Strum a guitar, write a song, finish top of her matric class, obtain a spot at medical school. Have that medical school say they will hold that spot for her while she pursues her cricket career, but she gets so good at cricket that eventually she chooses not to attend.
But never mind, a few years later, now established as one of the world’s best batters ― possessing a cover drive that’s regularly compared to those of Joe Root and Virat Kohli ― she did classes online and earned a Bachelor of Science degree, cum laude. Oh, and she has a more than decent golf swing.
Given all of that, a hundred in a World Cup semifinal was probably inevitable.
There were several facets to her 169 against England that will ensure its place in the pantheon of great sporting achievements by a South African athlete. One of those was the aesthetics of it.
Wolvaardt is possessed of that rare gift in that her talent (in this case at cricket) is expressed with glittering beauty. Think Brian Lara batting, Muhammad Ali boxing, Ayrton Senna driving or Roger Federer hitting a tennis ball ― all athletes who turned sport into art. Wolvaardt managed that ― in a World Cup semifinal.
There was a display of the kind of improvement she and Ward had been working on last year. Wolvaardt has always been a dominant off-side player. England had corrected their lines after a shaky start when they offered her too much width and allowed an array of aesthetically pleasing drives to be unleashed.
When they eventually straightened their lines and didn’t offer her room to free her arms, by targeting the stumps more, those “newer” parts of Wolvaardt’s batting emerged. She swept the England ace Sophie Ecclestone, she whacked her first six over long-on against Charlie Dean and did the same to Nat Sciver-Brunt a few balls later.
She unfurled boxing-like combinations, thumping a ball from Dean through midwicket and off the next delivery, stepping outside leg-stump and, in that silky smooth way of hers, sending a cover drive to the boundary.
The 6,4,4,4 string of boundaries against Smith ― who’d been England’s go to bowler at the death —were all dispatched on the leg-side, something Wolvaardt of three years ago would not have managed.
Her last 69 runs came off 28 balls, a period in which she also struck four sixes, along with an additional eight fours. Some have described the assault as brutal, and purely by the numbers it was, but there was a gracefulness about the execution that elevated a sporting achievement into something that should be celebrated as art.
Wolvaardt described the performance as “unreal”. Her primary goal had been to reach the 40th over, then she reckoned she “could have a swing”.
Not surprisingly she described the innings as the best of her career ― given the match, the opponent and the quality of the bowlers she faced.
It was that rare and most valuable of performances, a merger of talent and execution when the pressure was at its most intense.
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