Zimbabwe’s ledger of loss in T20Is stretches back a dozen games and includes defeat by Thailand. Their most recent win was achieved against Namibia in Windhoek in September last year, when they also beat Uganda, Nigeria and Sierra Leone — undoubtedly a collection of minnows.

So a series of five T20Is against the Zimbabwe zeroes in Bulawayo next month would seem a prime opportunity for someone of Laura Wolvaardt’s level and busyness — she has played 47 games this year — to take a break. Good luck telling her that.

“You go and ask Laura not to play for her country,” Mandla Mashimbyi told a press conference on Wednesday.“That would be a big fight. She could have taken the option to rest. But she said, ‘Every opportunity I get to play for South Africa, I want to play.’”

Others have taken the chance to skip the series. Neither Marizanne Kapp nor Dané van Niekerk will be there. Suné Luus, Nonkululeko Mlaba, Tazmin Brits, Chloe Tryon, Nadine de Klerk, Ayabonga Khaka and Shabnim Ismail will also watch from afar.

The T20I experience of those nine players adds up to 959 caps. The squad of Mashimbyi will take north of the Limpopo River have played 357 T20Is collectively. That’s just more than a third as many as the nine notable absentees between them.

Maybe that’s another reason Wolvaardt will be aboard in her regular role as captain and key batter. Her 104 caps, Sinalo Jafta’s 73, Anneke Bosch’s 53 and Annerie Dercksen’s 42 comprise more than three-quarters of the total. On her own Wolvaardt has more than a quarter of the experience of a squad that includes three uncapped players: off-spinner Luyanda Nzuza and seamers Nthabiseng Nini and Caitlin Wyngaard. Three others — medium pacer Ayanda Hlubi, wicketkeeper-batter Karabo Meso and allrounder Miané Smit — have yet to play 10 T20Is.

Mashimbyi spun that as a positive: “Leading such a young team will give us an opportunity to see where [Wolvaardt] is with her captaincy skills and give her the confidence needed for her to really rely on her soldiers.

“I want to see a different side of her now that we’ve got a young team, and see that she can impose herself on these players and drive them the way she wants to drive them, which is to play good, tough, brave cricket and to play to win.”

All of which was geared towards bringing the bigger picture into focus: “There’s nothing I’ll be doing now without the 2029 [ODI] World Cup in mind.We have to expose these players as much as possible to international cricket when the opportunities present themselves, to see whether they’ve got the capability to thrive at that level. We can’t do that if we don’t give them the chance to play.”

An even bigger picture loomed over all that. Shukri Conrad told a press conference last Tuesday, when South Africa’s squad for a triangular series in Namibia that will include Zimbabwe that will be a followed by an ODI rubber against the hosts, that the South Africans had a “responsibility as the big brother to ensure we assist where we can in the development of cricket in all of Africa”. Did Mashimbyi concur?

“We have prominence because we’ve been to semifinals and finals; we’ve been asking the right questions in world cricket,” Mashimbyi said.“But if we want to be stronger we need to make sure that the continent is stronger. So I agree with Shukri. We have a responsibility to make sure cricket grows in our region and in our continent.”

Mashimbyi might not wax quite so philosophically about African cricket unity if the Zimbabweans do the unthinkable and pull off a win over his team. That is unlikely: they have lost all 16 T20Is they have played against opponents from fellow ICC full member countries.

But it’s just as true that they have never played against their big sisters from down south. And most of these particular 15 sisters are not that big …