User:Harrias/Lizelle Lee

Lizelle Lee (born 2 April 1992) is a South African cricketer who has played for the South Africa women's national cricket team from 2013 to 2022. She has played for Western Storm and Surrey Stars in the Women's Cricket Super League, as well as Melbourne Stars and Melbourne Renegades in the Women's Big Bash League. Lee is an opening batter. In January 2022, Lee was named the ICC Women's ODI Cricketer of the Year. In July 2022, Lee announced her retirement from international cricket.

Early and personal life
Lizelle Lee was born on 2 April 1992 in Ermelo, a small coal mining town in the Mpumalanga province, in eastern South Africa. Both her father and brother played cricket, and she played with them at home, to which she credits her early love and development in the sport. Due to a lack of girl's cricket teams, she initially played boy's cricket at school; all the way through primary school, and then for the first two years of high school, before her school stopped her from playing. Over the subsequent two years, she played for two other schools which did have girl's teams, and won the league with each of them, after which her school established a girl's team.

Alongside cricket, she also played field hockey, and her ambition was to play hockey internationally. During her time at Potchefstroom University, where she was studying to become a teacher, she was called up a training camp with the South Africa hockey team, but despite staying with the team for a while, she never made an international appearance.

Lee married long-term partner Tanja Cronje in September 2020. Their wedding had been planned for April 2020, but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lee and Cronje had their first child in 2022.

Early domestic career
Lee made her provincial cricket debut for Mpumalanga in 2008, aged 15. During her debut season for the province, she scored 13 runs from four innings. The following season, she improved her tally, accumulating 116 runs from her five appearances; making her Mpumalanga's leading run-scorer by a significant margin. In 2009–10, Lee was not only her team's standout batter, scoring 174 runs, but she also had the third highest batting average in the tournament, 58.00. She scored her first two half-centuries that season, including 88 runs against Gauteng. During the 2010–11 season, as well as playing four times for Mpumalanga, Lee also made a debut appearance for North West. In both 2010–11 and 2011–12, she ranked among the top-ten batters by average in the Provincial League, and in 2012–13 she played full-time with North West, where she was studying at university.

Domestic and franchise career
Lee has played for Western Storm and Surrey Stars in the English Women's Cricket Super League. She was part of the Stars team that lost their 2017 Women's Cricket Super League semi-final to Western Storm. In the 2018 Women's Cricket Super League final, Lee scored 104 off 58 balls to help the Stars beat Loughborough Lightning. In September 2019, she was named in the M van der Merwe XI squad for the inaugural edition of the Women's T20 Super League in South Africa.

Lee represented Melbourne Stars for three seasons in the Australian Women's Big Bash League (WBBL). She made 40 appearances for the Stars, scoring 1,100 runs. In her first match of the 2018–19 Women's Big Bash League season, Lee scored 102* from 56 balls. It was her third career century in Twenty20 cricket, and her first in the WBBL. Ahead of the 2020–21 Women's Big Bash League season, Lee joined Melbourne Renegades, replacing Jess Duffin who was on maternity leave. In 2021, she was drafted by Manchester Originals for the inaugural season of The Hundred. She was the leading run scorer of Manchester Originals with 215 runs in the tournament.

In April 2022, she was bought by the Manchester Originals for the 2022 season of The Hundred.

International career
Lee made her debut for the South Africa women's national cricket team against Bangladesh in 2013. In March 2018, she was one of fourteen players to be awarded a national contract by Cricket South Africa ahead of the 2018–19 season. In May 2018, during the series against Bangladesh Women, she became the third player for South Africa Women to score 2,000 runs in WODIs.

In October 2018, she was named in South Africa's squad for the 2018 ICC Women's World Twenty20 tournament in the West Indies. In February 2019, Lee was withdrawn from the South Africa squad for their series against Sri Lanka due to fitness concerns. Later in the year, Lee scored 75* off 48 balls in the fifth match of the 2019 series against Pakistan to help South Africa win the series 3–2. In October 2019, Lee scored 84 from 47 balls in South Africa's fifth T20I in India. South Africa won the match by 105 runs, but lost the series 3–1.

In January 2020, she was named in South Africa's squad for the 2020 ICC Women's T20 World Cup in Australia. In South Africa's match against Thailand, Lee scored her first century in WT20I cricket, with 101 runs. It was the fastest century by a South African woman in Twenty20 cricket. On 23 July 2020, Lee was named in South Africa's 24-woman squad to begin training in Pretoria, ahead of their tour to England.

In February 2022, she was named in South Africa's team for the 2022 Women's Cricket World Cup in New Zealand. On 31 March 2022, in the semi-final match against England, Lee played in her 100th WODI match.

In July 2022, Lee announced her retirement from international cricket.