Coming into the first semi-final of the T20 World Cup, Anneke Bosch was under pressure. She’d made scores of 18, 11 and 25 in her previous innings, all of which came at less than a run a ball. But in Dubai against Australia, the team who had beaten South Africa in the final of the previous tournament 18 months ago, something clicked.

“To be quite honest I was going into that game thinking, the sooner I get out the better it is for the team,” Bosch tells Wisden.com. “I was eating balls and I wasn’t getting any runs… I felt like I was letting the team down and letting myself down.

“But that’s how cricket goes. The England game in that tournament was one of the worst of my career, and a couple of days later, I had one of my best innings. It’s funny how quickly things can turn around.”

In a chase of 135, against an Australia side going for their fourth consecutive tournament crown, Bosch smashed 74 off 48 balls, including the winning runs to see South Africa into the final with plenty to spare. From the first sweep she played to crash Sophie Molineux for four through midwicket, to the final full toss she dispatched off Megan Schutt to seal the result, it was undoubtedly the innings of the tournament.

“The whole innings feels like a big blur,” says Bosch. “I don’t really remember much of it. I think by the time Laura [Wolvaardt] got out, we needed 14 from 30 and I was like ‘we’ve got this, there’s no way we’ll lose this from here,’ but you never know. From when I walked in to the last ball the only thing I was focussed on was the bottom part of the scoreboard that showed the number of balls and the amount of runs needed. I wasn’t looking at anything else.

“Looking back at it now, I realise more of how big of a moment it was and how special. When you’re in the moment, you don’t quite realise it. Obviously you’re happy and excited but you can’t quite take in the full extent of it. Especially with the tournament I had going into that game, finishing the game off and getting us into the final was super special and definitely the best part of my career so far.”

On the same ground three days later, South Africa were beaten in the final by a note-perfect New Zealand side. In a sharp turnaround, Bosch managed just nine off 15 balls before edging a slog behind off Amelia Kerr. In the soap opera of South Africa at ICC tournaments, it was a devastating loss from the highest of highs.

“We’re still pretty sad about that,” says Bosch. “It hurts, and it’s going to hurt for a while, but we have to move on and take the learnings we can. New Zealand played really well and were the better team on the day.

“Last year’s final was disappointing, but it was our first time in a final and it was against Australia, so it didn’t hurt as much as this one did. If you beat a team like Australia in a World Cup, it’s kind of unfair not to have the trophy after that because they are such a dominant team. But unfortunately New Zealand were better than us on the day.”

*****

That it was New Zealand and South Africa in the final speaks volumes about how those sides have managed to cling on to the financial juggernauts of the ‘big three’ despite the challenges they face. While New Zealand have brought professionalism into their domestic set-up over the last three years, paid contracts outside of the national side were only established to a meaningful extent in South Africa last year.

Bosch’s career tells the story of the difficulties of surviving in that chasm. Having made her debut in Australia in 2016 at the age of 23, she failed to impress and was dropped from the side. What followed was five years on the fringes with little in the way of cricket to fall back on.

“I was working and still trying to get enough time for cricket,” Bosch says. “I came to a point where I had to make a decision on whether cricket was going to work out because we didn’t have domestic contracts. Before my national contract in 2022, I wasn’t earning any money from cricket. I had to work and it was long hours and then I started studying again and I had to look for new routes into cricket because I was starting to accept that it wasn’t meant to be.

“I worked at a biokineticist practice. I’d start at 7am and work until six at night every day. The first year I worked was in 2017 and there was no time for cricket so I only played over the weekends and I never trained. The year after that I started taking Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off to go and practice. I worked like that for two years and then, as I started touring more, I was working less and the contract came in and I was able to stop working completely.

“Deep down I still had that belief and hope that things would work out. It was a bit of a gamble though.”

In the context of that system, South Africa’s achievements over the last decade have been immense. Since 2017, they have only failed to reach the semi-finals of an ICC competition once. Despite many of their golden generation of Lizelle Lee, Shabnim Ismail and Dane van Niekerk now having moved on from international cricket, they have found a steady stream of replacements, enough to hold the fort until the professional domestic generation comes through.

Nevertheless, Bosch is clear there is more work to be done to establish a system that fully prepares players for everything international cricket will throw at them.

“There could be more games,” she says. “The season is six months long and we only play 10 50-over games and 10 T20s. Any game time you get shapes you into the cricketer you want to be. Looking forward, if that can be a longer stretch and we can start playing three-day or four-day cricket at least, because we don’t have that and we’re starting to play more Tests now, the exposure will help a lot.”

England’s tour of South Africa, which starts with a T20I on Sunday, November 24, will conclude with a four-day Test match in Bloemfontein. It will be South Africa’s third Test match this year - as many as the total they played across the two previous decades. They will play five more by the end of 2028.

Equally, there are still no formal plans to establish a women’s SA20 following the success the men’s franchise competition has had in its first two seasons, and despite the legacy plan which was rolled following South Africa hosting the 2023 Women’s T20 World Cup.

Individual success stories like Bosch’s have so far been enough to keep South Africa near the top echelons of the game. But, as the game continues to develop at a helter skelter pace, the final push to the top is still waiting under the surface to be unleashed.

While the successes South Africa have had as a side over the last eight years, and individual stories like Bosch’s have so far been enough to keep them near the top echelons of the game, the final push to the top is still waiting under the surface to be unleashed.

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