Lizelle Lee opens up on her rift with CSA

image-l6anfdzmLizelle Lee

Former Proteas batter Lizelle Lee has opened up on her struggles with Cricket South Africa moments before her retirement. 

Lee who retired in the middle of the South Africa Women tour to England, alleged that CSA deemed her unfit to play even after she had passed the physical tests. The batter explained how failure to meet health and fitness requirements leads to the denial of NOC. 

She also expressed that she had been struggling with losing weight but was physically fit to play cricket, she had passed all her running tests despite being overweight. 

Lee on her weight struggles

“I just got to the point of saying, ‘you’re not thinking of my cricket skills, you’re not thinking that I made the actual running fitness, you’re just thinking about my weight and not picking me then’. Emotionally that is so draining and I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

"As a woman, that breaks me. It's probably one of the toughest things to hear is that you're not being able to play for a team because you weight too much."


image-l6ajzcuwLee in England

Failure to meet health requirements

“The big thing that got me is that I made the fitness physically. I did the running that I had to do. Basically, I’m fit to play,”



Lee on her mental struggles 

“I don’t feel good about myself, I don’t even look at myself in the mirror anymore because I don’t like the way I look. That just comes about because every time I’m in camp it’s always about my weight. Emotionally it just breaks a person down,”

Financial woes for the Proteas batter 

“The Hundred came in, the Super League before the Hundred, Big Bash, when I got all of those things, there were all of those things I needed to pay off.

“That’s the thing people don’t understand. Yes, we earn a lot of money now – a lot of money in our eyes – but they don’t understand what happened before that. That’s three, four years of debt that I had to pay off. There’s always going to be a financial factor.”


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