admin
Zimbabwe’s whitewash by Afghanistan in the just ended three-match series of one-day cricket games shows in many ways the major problems in Zimbabwean cricket and the need to build it up to something far closer to a mass game if we are ever going to get anywhere.
To put the scale of the defeat into perspective, and these were not our first defeats against Afghanistan as we have never beaten them, we need to go back to the 1990s.
In 1992 Zimbabwe became a full member of the International Cricket Council, a test-playing nation, and one of the elite in the cricketing world.
Even today, when the ICC have been adding to the numbers briskly, there are only 12 test countries ranking as full members among the 106 members; the other 94 are associates.
At that time hardly anyone in Afghanistan played cricket.
A lot of people started learning and playing in the refugee camps in Pakistan, and it has been war and civil war that first drove the progress of Afghanistan cricket and has been a major factor since.
The cricket board was only formed in 1995, became an 1CC affiliate in 2001 and shot into test status in 2017, one of the most spectacular rises in cricket history.
Zimbabwe’s fortunes have been a lot more pedestrian, and at times we voluntarily removed ourselves from the test scene and even today we do not play much test cricket.
From the very beginning, we knew we had to move cricket from what had been a small minority sport before independence into something a lot closer to a mass participation game.
There were some good ideas to spread the game a lot more widely, some with results and some with just modest success or even very little success.
An inter-provincial tournament was put in place, although this was largely artificial without the sort of mass support that successful top leagues in test nations are supposed to have.
You need to think of the English county championship, the way states go for each other in India and Australia, even the inter-provincial tournament in South Africa.
Perhaps the ultimate are the international games played as the local league in West Indies where people bring the flag to the cricket grounds, although some of the “provincial teams” are more complex, being made up of a group of small neighbouring islands, assembled so they can take on the big islands.
But in an exciting cricket country these local leagues provide a lot of the pressure, the talent scouting, and a lot of the local interest in the game.
Even when some good Zimbabwean franchises are playing a local league match, the spectators seem to be more interested in looking at the quality of the cricketers, rather than hoping “their” team will wipe the opposition. Spectators do not seem to have much of “their” team spirit.
While Cricket Zimbabwe likes to say cricket is the second-most popular sport after soccer, a lot depends on what you are measuring and how you measure it. At school levels most people would label athletics as easily the most second popular sport.
Attending the provincial championships and then the inter-provincial games can be an eye-opener as buses emerge from schools that are hardly on everyone’s lips and drop off some rather good athletes.
Cricket, regrettably, has a small school base and the required serious break-through into something that looks a lot more inclusive and national has yet to take place.
Part of the problem, of course, is the cost of cricket and cricket equipment, a problem faced by many sports and helps explain that in many ways rugby has made more of a breakthrough than cricket or hockey or other sports that need expensive imported equipment, and a ground that needs to be a lot better than a rectangle of rough grass.
It is necessary to look at the school cricket since, as with so many sports, this is where the enthusiasm is generated, especially if a sport is new to most adults, and where the fun can be shown as well as the most talented identified.
While race has long been absent as a factor in cricket and nobody fusses about it any more, the odd paler complexion under the hat is a useful way of noticing that the main players still come through a very limited number of schools, generally upper-middle class schools.
And so although Zimbabwe has more than 15 million people, the number playing cricket is rather small.
While race is not a factor, regrettably class tends to be an important factor, that people at certain types of school and people in certain kinds of family are far more likely to watch cricket, play cricket and enjoy cricket.
There are of course many exceptions, but the trend is there.
Fairly obviously, the vast numbers in refugee camps gave Afghan cricket a broader start and somehow, despite war and civil war, the wide base has been maintained and grown.
A country like Afghanistan can do a lot better than Zimbabwe simply because it has a lot more active players and so has a larger pool to choose from.
Cricket Zimbabwe has seen this problem since even before we obtained test status and has worked at trying to assemble this broader base, but with limited success.
It knows clearly what is needed: more coaches in more schools, more equipment although this can be donated or obtained if there are teams, more participation and more people watching and talking about cricket as well as playing it.
So perhaps one new approach would be to see what sort of more natural inter-provincial league could be developed, rather than the fairly artificial franchises that presently operate, and that in turn would help provide at least one adequate ground in every larger town, which in turn could build the player base and the public fascination.
Once we have people arguing over what happened to such and such a player last week, or why did Cricket Zimbabwe hire this coach, or something else, even if the argument is quite unfair, then Cricket Zimbabwe will know that the player pool and spectator pool will grow big, and it can stop worrying if some small country can beat Zimbabwe and start selecting a team that can beat the top half dozen.
Online Reporter