BUMPER TEST SCHEDULE

THIS year New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Pakistan will play five cricket Tests each, Bangladesh six, West Indies seven, South Africa eight, India and England ten each and Australia 11.

Only one other team will play as many matches as the last of those: Zimbabwe.

Despite not being part of the World Test Championship, Zimbabwe have actively sought out Test fi-tures, which they see as their responsibility as an ICC Full Member, even if they have no one holding them to that.

“I believe that every Full Member must play all three formats. It’s part of our eligibility criteria,” Tavengwa Mukhulani, Zimbabwe Cricket chairman, says.

“We are a country that has played over 100 Tests [123 to date], so we are a Test nation.”

This staunch commitment has recently been boosted a notch. Since making their Test comeback in 2011, Zimbabwe have played 40 matches in 14 years: an average of just under three Tests a year. In some years, like 2015 and 2019, they did not play any.

Before this year, the most Tests they had played in a calendar year since the comeback was six in 2013.

Zimbabwe have already played two home Tests this year, and are due to host six more. They’ve also played two away, and have another such scheduled in England this month, which is historically significant.

It is the first time Zimbabwe will play there since 2004 and the first time they will play against Eng-land in any format since 2007.

That statistic alone says how starved Zimbabwe are of cricket against the top nations.

They haven’t played a Test against Australia since 2003, against India since 2005, and against neigh-bours South Africa since 2017.

Mukuhlani calls it an “informal segregation,” one that “should have no place in sport” because of how it entrenches inequalities.

He wants to see an equal spread of fixtures, in which all Full Member teams play each other.

“Every one of the 12 Full Members must be given an opportunity to play against each other in all three formats.

“If you look at football, which has grown phenomenally globally, Brazil plays Honduras, England plays Malta.

“This story that there are those who are playing on one side of the aisle and those playing on [the other] has no place in sport,” he says.

“We need a bare minimum home-and-away schedule, and over and above that, countries can then organise their bilaterals [as] suits their commercial needs.”

Mukuhlani is also against a two-tier Test system because he thinks it will leave the smaller nations even further behind.

“If you’ve got a two-tier system, the question is, what do you want to achieve? Do you want to formalise segregation?

“As it is, we are struggling to sell our TV rights because the big boys are not on our FTP, so if you for-malise it, what are we going to sell? How do we survive? The biggest question that the cricket world must answer is, ‘How do you want the smaller nations to survive?’ Or do you even want them to survive?”

This question carries more weight when you consider who is asking it.

If there is a country that has teetered on the brink of cricketing extinction – part from Kenya, who have gone from the brink of Test status to not even being in the picture for white-ball World Cups – it’s Zimbabwe.

After playing their first Test in 1992, they took part in 83 matches before voluntarily taking a sabbatical, which eventually extended to six years, amid economic and political turmoil in 2005.

They have battled a range of financial problems and an ICC suspension for government interference in 2019, which led to them missing out on qualification for the 2021 T20 World Cup.

Since then, they have cleaned up their finances, in particular, and made their annual ICC disbursement of US$13.5 million stretch to fund a five-team domestic system, which includes a first-class competition and the national sides, and to host Tests at US$500 000 a pop. This bumper year, hosting Tests will cost them about US$4 million.

Those improvements came too late for Zimbabwe to be included in the WTC, and they were told of no pathway for how they might be involved in the future.

“We don’t know why we are not part of the WTC and we don’t know the criteria of how the teams in the WTC were picked. Equally, we don’t know what we need to do to be in that league,” Mukhulani says.

What they do know is that playing Test cricket is a matter of living up to their status and upskilling their cricketers.

“If you want to develop cricketers, they must play Test cricket,” Mukuhlani says. “By playing Test crick-et, we will fix our white-ball problems because players [will be] learning and improving on the basics.”

The person who has to oversee that process is head coach Justin Sammons, who was appointed in June last year. In his first month, he oversaw Zimbabwe’s first Test in 17 months and first away from home in three years. Immediately, he saw the challenges that would lie ahead.

“The big learning was that we were not fit enough,” he says. “We had to work on that.”

In cool, seamer-friendly conditions in Belfast, Zimbabwe took the game to a fourth day and held the advantage when they had Ireland 21 for 5, chasing 158 to win.

That they were not able to close out the match from that position is something Sammons put down partly to their lack of familiarity with being in a position of advantage. — Agencies