Chronicle EditorBrandon Moyo, [email protected]
ZIMBABWE Emerging head coach, Steve Mangongo, has said that the country needs to invest in genuine young talent rather than recycling players who have failed to deliver.
The Emerging side recently lost the multi-format series against South Africa Emerging, but the youngsters who played impressed despite the losses.
Mangongo, who also heads the country’s high-performance programme, said that the team needed to invest more in players like Emmanuel Bawa and Alistair Frost, who impressed with the bat, rather than relying on senior players who have failed.
He also said that creating a wider pool of selection was the only solution to help Zimbabwe Cricket get out of its current crisis.
ZC named a strong team for the multi-format series against South Africa Emerging, which ends today. However, it has been the youngsters who led from the front despite results not going Zimbabwe’s way. With only one game left in the three-match one-day series, South Africa Emerging, who brought a genuine emerging team unlike the hosts, now enjoys an unassailable 2-0 lead.
Mangongo believes that it is time genuine emerging players are given the opportunity to grow their game instead of recycling players who have been tried but cannot produce any tangible outcomes.
“We also want to make it very clear, from a technical point of view as head coach, when we see youngsters like Bawa and Frost putting on the runs, we need to start thinking very highly. Maybe some of these players who have more than a decade playing first-class cricket with no returns should now make way for youngsters. That is the truth of the matter,” said Mangongo.
Bawa and Frost, both former Zimbabwe Under-19 internationals, have been a marvel to watch during the series, and are among the top five leading run-scorers in the series.
Bawa (20) scored 49 and 45 runs in the two matches he has played so far, while Frost (24) has a high score of 63 not out and another of 25 runs. Frost was also outstanding with the bat in the second Test, scoring a half-century in the first innings and 36 in the second.
However, senior players like Tinashe Kamunhukamwe have failed to justify their selection. With 27 international caps to his name across ODIs and T20Is, Kamunhukamwe only has five runs in two innings for the Emerging side.
On Thursday, Mangongo watched his team failing to defend 311 runs in the second one-day game. The hosts dropped eight catches, and Mangongo believes that the performance mirrors the state of cricket in the country.
Despite the crisis, he was pleased with how his emerging batters fared but believes more work needs to be done.
“We can only say that it’s a mirror of our game in this country. What we are showing out there is a mirror of our domestic game and we need to sort it from the grassroots.
You cannot drop eight catches at the highest level. This is not the first time; we did it in the four-day game as well. So you can see that there are some issues with our fundamentals of the game so we have to admit, for lack of a better word, it’s a crisis. We fix one end, we bat well, and we come in and drop catches and lose a game which we should have not lost at all.
“However, well done to the batting group, we saw young Bawa giving us good starts and that is commendable. We saw Naqvi batting very aggressively, getting us some good runs and those are positive from the batting side, but in cricket, you don’t bat and go home, we will need to fix that.
“Perhaps it’s over a long-term period or short-term period where we identify our weaknesses. At this level, if you can’t field you won’t win games,” he said.
Despite having already lost the series, Mangongo said there is still something to play for today. He said they will make some changes to the team but the players need to rid themselves of their losing mentality if they are to grow.
He added that the only solution to the crisis that Zimbabwe cricket is currently facing is creating a wide pool of selection so that no one gets comfortable with failure.
“We are now just playing for pride, we need to bounce back and hopefully we will get a consolation win. We have a couple of youngsters on the bench who we believe that at this developmental stage, we have to assess them and see how far they are in terms of international cricket.
“When you play international cricket, you need to be able to win games, winning is a habit and losing is also a habit. At the moment, we are in the habit of losing games and that turnaround takes fortitude, discipline, and commitment. At the end of the day, the players cross the rope and coaches can only do so much.
“This is where we also look deeper and say we need a large pool of players to compete. Because, if we keep having a small pool of players, players can go and mess around knowing that they are going to get picked because we lack depth and that is the truth of the matter,” said Mangongo. – @brandon_malvin
Online Reporter