The New Zealand national cricket team is set to receive a petition for them to abandon their tour of Zimbabwe, but the team left New Zealand yesterday for their week’s training camp in Harare full of confidence that their two-match Test series will take place in Bulawayo.
BY Sports Reporter
Ahead of their flight to South Africa yesterday afternoon, coach Mike Hesson said he was confident the matches would go ahead.
“Yeah, I am, absolutely. I mean there’s nothing to suggest that it won’t at this stage,” he said.
“We are being pretty well briefed in terms of what’s happening.
“Obviously [we are] heading to South Africa for seven or eight days. If anything changes, I’m sure we’ll be given plenty of instruction, so we are very confident, we are getting up-to-date information.”
A petition, likely to be handed to the cricket authorities in New Zealand to try and stop the tour by yesterday had 92 supporters.
Helen Doran, who started the petition, argued that it was improper for the New Zealand team to tour Zimbabwe and enjoy the cricket and nice food while many people in the country struggled to put food on the table.
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“Can we, as a nation, send our international cricket team into a country that is shutting itself down in protest against it’s government?” she wrote.
“Black Caps please, you can’t enter Zimbabwe while the political pressure is at boiling point, play a couple of games of cricket, eat some nice imported food while people outside the stadium are starving, crying, dying, and then hop into your tour bus getting escorted past roadblocks, where the ordinary citizen would be stopped and cash extorted under threat, back to your hotel to sleep while the ordinary citizen is out on the street battling for their basic human rights?”
New Zealand is set to tour Zimbabwe for two Tests in Bulawayo, but they will first travel to Harare for their warm-up match on July 22.
