tawandamusarurwa
PJ MOOR moved to Ireland to play cricket and broke two fingers learning how.
“The ball does a lot more after it’s bounced, so as a wicketkeeper, you have to concentrate a lot more,” Moor said.
“In Zimbabwe that didn’t really happen. The ball used to just carry nicely to the keepers, but in Ireland, it nips and seams around. In my first season, I couldn’t keep for a few months and I broke two fingers in three years.”
The hazards to his extremities were a small price to pay for what Moor saw as a genuine opportunity, at a time when those were disappearing in the country of his birth.
It was mid-2019 and Zimbabwe Cricket (ZC) had been suspended from the International Cricket Council (ICC), putting the team’s participation for the 2020 T20 World Cup qualifiers and the future of the game in the country in doubt.
At the same time, Ireland, a country Moor knew well from holidays as a child and club cricket stints in his early 20s, gained Test status and enjoyed a fairly regular white-ball schedule which included a 3-0 ODI series whitewash over a Zimbabwe squad Moor was part of.
Though born and brought up in Zimbabwe, he had an Irish passport — his paternal grandmother was from the country.
With that in hand, Moor was presented with what seemed a no-brainer.
“My family has strong ties to Ireland. I have always loved it, and I saw it as a chance to progress my career.”
In October that year, he relocated to Dublin and joined Clontarf Cricket Club, in a system he describes as being “like a little family”, but an enterprising one.
“When I compare what they (Ireland) were like when I first went there (to what they were in 2019), they had come on in leaps and bounds,” he said.
But it would be a while before he was to actually play provincial cricket there.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought cricket to a halt everywhere in the world and Ireland’s domestic season was one of the biggest casualties. In the summer of 2020, they only played four List A matches and six T20 games while their first-class competition did not take place at all.
Moor was always going to have to play a waiting game — because players who want to represent a second country at international level must have a three-year cooling-off period from the time they play their last game for the first country — but it felt even longer. Eventually, the next summer, Moor got going for Munster.
“I was welcomed into a system that was enthusiastic about a player who had played Test cricket coming into their domestic structures. They treated me so well,” he said, even if he found keeping wicket slightly tough.
With eight Test caps to his name, Moor is more experienced than all of the Ireland squad.
Only Andy Balbirnie, Andy McBrine, Mark Adair and George Dockrell have played Tests before, and between them, they have seven caps.
Of those, Balbirnie is the only one other than Moor to have played more than one first-class game in the last three years.
Six other members of the Test squad played an unofficial Test in Bangladesh in 2021 but the rest have not played any red-ball games since 2019 and, of those, Matthew Humphreys and Ben White have not played a first-class game at all.
All that must mean Moor is a shoo-in for a Test debut but, with Lorcan Tucker also in the squad, Moor may not be their first-choice wicketkeeper given his finger issues.
That does not matter to Moor, who sees a chance to re-establish himself as an international player and a core member of the Ireland Test side that are rebuilding their brand.
“Everyone is just so excited to play Test cricket,” Moor said.
“Ireland play four Tests in the next two-and-a-half months, which is extremely exciting.”
That is perspective if you ever needed any.
While players from countries like South Africa and West Indies have been complaining about getting only six to eight Tests a year (and rightly so), Ireland, who are not part of the World Test Championship, will grab their four with both hands.
The fourth of those is against England at Lord’s, which for Moor is a career goal he may never have achieved if he had stayed with Zimbabwe.
England do not play Zimbabwe for political reasons. — cricinfo
Online Reporter