Zimbabwe Cricket reached new lows at the weekend, with the national team losing to Afghanistan in a match we should have won to progress to the next stage of the World T20 Championship.
NewsDay Comment
Not very long ago, Zimbabwe rubbed shoulders with the very best of cricket, scoring memorable wins against England in a Test series and beating India and South Africa at the 1999 Cricket World Cup, but now we have been reduced to playing and losing to Afghanistan.
Zimbabwe joined the elite ranks of cricket in 1992 and instead of the sport growing, it has gone unbelievably backwards and soon we will find it hard to justify our Test status.
Bangladesh, which became a full member years after Zimbabwe, has long surpassed us and instead of training our sights on Test-playing nations, we find ourselves losing to Afghanistan, a team that is to all intents and purposes still building their cricket infrastructure. What an embarrassment! While the players must shoulder a big chunk of the blame, questions must be asked of the administration as well. How did we get so poor so fast?
Are the people running cricket any knowledgeable of the sport, or they find themselves there due to some horse-trading to accommodate various and competing interests?
We cannot afford to have people without the interests of the game running cricket in the country because that is a sure way to failure.
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Zimbabwe Cricket (ZC) should be made to explain how some of our best talents, Heath Streak and Grant Flower, were lost to the country only for them to surface and excel in Bangladesh and Pakistan, respectively?
The cricket authorities must explain why it is so easy for us to lose players and administrators rather than retain them.
There have been reports about the country losing players in the junior structures particularly to England and South Africa and ZC should not be a bystander when all this is going on, but rather should fight to keep the best talent in the country.
Our junior team did not do too badly in the Under-19 World Cup and ZC should ensure the boys are kept together, regularly playing and be progressively blended into the senior team, so they form the core of the squad in the next five or so years.
The current team has failed us and there is no need to keep investing in it. Now is the time to start grooming junior players, sending them on foreign scholarships and exchange programmes and hopefully this will do the trick.
There is also need to look at the domestic cricket structures and whether the franchise system has added any value to our national team.
If it has not, then there is need to restructure it for the benefit of the sport.
While losing to Afghanistan on the global stage is definitely a new low, we should be wary that other teams like Ireland are constantly improving and not before long they will catch up and beat us on the world rankings.
