Imagine if we had lost?

Robson Sharuko Senior Sports Editor
HAD Zimbabwe not held their nerves at Harare Sports Club on Saturday, to post their historic Test victory over Pakistan, this would have been a rough week of endless criticism fired at the game’s leadership in this country. Maybe that explains the emotions that overcame Peter Chingoka, at the fall of the final Pakistan wicket, and sent him into his team’s dressing room to share that golden moment with his gallant troops who had just delivered one of Test cricket’s result of the year.

Predictably, very little has been written to salute the heroics of Tendai Chatara’s five-wicket haul in that match because the script had been prepared, in hostile newsrooms across the world, that the story would be about the impact of Kyle Jarvis’ absence from this Test.

At least, Brian Vitori’s five-wicket return in the first innings of the second Test was rewarded with a feature, of his second coming, on Cricinfo.

But such has been the respected site’s obsession with negativity when it comes to Zimbabwe Cricket that, in the match where its frontline bowling team was an All-Blacks affair and restricted Pakistan to just 469 runs in two innings, their headline story this week was the need for the team to look for a bowling coach.

Of course, it’s easy to swallow the bait that it’s an article pregnant with innocence until you realise that in the lead-up to the second Test, the issue of us having a weak bowling attack was being raised in very high tones and that this team, without Heath Streak’s input, and in the absence of Jarvis, couldn’t be banked on to bowl out opponents twice.

And you don’t need to be a genius in analysis to see the venom, if not regret, that accompanied the tweets from the likes of Jarvis and Sean Ervine, two players who chose to turn their backs on the team, as they joined the bandwagon in celebrating Zimbabwe’s victory.

“Congrats to Zim on their win today, the boys deserved a win after everything they had to put up with,” said Jarvis while Ervine, too, couldn’t resist a dosage of spin.

“Great result for Brendan Taylor and the lads. With results on the field, time for ZC board to turn up,” said Ervine.
Compare that to what came from Pakistan captain Misbah-ul-Haq, who was left stranded after a heroic batting performance that took his team within reach of a victory that would have swept them to a series win.

“Zimbabwe deserved the victory, they played excellent cricket in the first Test and this one. Even from the start they were positive, they had us under pressure throughout the game,” Misbah said.

Interestingly, no one gave credit to the ZC that their expensive but necessary programme, to convert cricket from just an elite sport for the few privileged kids into one that could be played by anyone who wanted to do so in this country, was finally paying dividends.

Of course, doing so would have been politically incorrect to all those people given that any money injected into the ZC development programmes, which helped identify and nurture the likes of Chatara, was something they feel was just a waste of funds.

To them, cricket didn’t require such huge funding to try and produce the likes of Chatara because the game was already well and truly served, by those privileged few who used to believe this was their sport, a closed society, and the rest could just serve it by coming in as fans.
The good thing is that Chatara, even in his moment of glory, didn’t forget where he came from and had the presence of mind to thank the ZC for the investment in their development programme and, interestingly, noted that he might not have announced himself to the world if Jarvis had stayed.

Chatara would have played football, like most boys in his Dangamvura neighbourhood in Mutare, it was his first love, but that all changed when George Tandi, a development coach sent to the eastern border city to identify and nurture cricket talent, told him that his sporting talents could be better expressed elsewhere.

Nine of the players who played in that second Test could all trace their roots to the ZC development programme, but that’s a success story you are unlikely to read about in newspapers around the world or on Cricinfo because it’s virtually taboo to celebrate success stories that emerge from this country.

The flip side of this could have been seen if Zimbabwe had lost the series and an entire army of critics would have been dispatched to tear into the ZC leadership for letting the team down, letting the players and their coaching staff down and letting their financial woes bring the game of Test cricket into disrepute.

Forgotten voices from the past would have been revived, from their locations in outposts around the world, and they would have told us how standards have spectacularly fallen and how they long for the “good old golden days” when the Zimbabwe cricket team had men of steel who could compete favourably against the best in the world.

But how good were the so-called golden days of the past?
Isn’t it just a myth that the Zimbabwe Test team was an awesome machine, before the player rebellion of 2004, and it set standards that have proved too high for the present day players to scale?

If the players who represented the country on the Test arena between 1992 and 2003 were a golden generation, whose voices should be reawakened every time someone believes standards have dipped, what really did they do or achieve?
Statistics don’t seem to support the view that the Zimbabwe Test teams, which represented the country for the dozen years between the granting of Test status in 1992 and the player rebellion by white players in 2004, was an awesome machine that set very high standards which are being shredded by the so-called average players who now wear the shirt.
Zimbabwe played 71 Test matches, from their first Test against India at Harare Sports Club to that home Test series against Bangladesh in February/March 2004, just before the explosion of the player rebellion, with one Test match against Pakistan, in December 1998, being abandoned without a ball being bowled in Faisalabad because of fog.
That marked Zimbabwe’s first Test series win, having won one Test with the other being drawn on that tour.
Statistics show that the so-called golden generation of Zimbabwean cricketers won just seven Test matches, in 71 Tests, and the victories were just against India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, whose arrival on the scene boosted the victory numbers, while they failed to win against England, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Sri Lanka and the West Indies.
Of course, they could compete, fair and fine, but they were not magical teams and they were blown away in 39 of those 71 Tests with 25 ending in draws.
Four of Zimbabwe’s eight lowest totals in a Test innings, which are all below 100, came during that time of the so-called golden boys with the team being dismissed for 63 in Port of Spain in March 2000 by the West Indies, 79 by Sri Lanka in Galle in January 2002, 83 at Lord’s in England in May 2000 and 94 by England at Chester-le-Street in June 2003.
The 63 all out was particularly depressing, coming as it did when Zimbabwe was considered to be at the peak of its powers, when the team crumbled at Queens Park Oval chasing just 99 runs, in their second innings, to win the Test.
Only Grant Flower scored a double, getting 26 runs, but the rest of the scorecard made sorry reading — Neil Johnson (3), Trevor Gripper (3), Murray Goodwin (8), Andy Flower (5), Alistair Campbell (6), Stuart Carlisle (3), Heath Streak (0), Brian Murphy (0), Henry Olonga (0) and Mphumelelo Mbangwa (0).
Since Zimbabwe’s return to the Test arena, the country has played 10 Tests, won three and lost seven and whether this return represents a marked decline, as the army of critics of the ZC leaders, who use every result that goes against the team as a weapon to attack the game’s leadership, remains open for debate.
But if you take a closer look at the statistics, which don’t lie, you will see that the achievements of the Zimbabwe cricket teams of the past, especially on the Test arena, have somehow been blown way out of proportion.