adminZimbabwe Cricket is facing various financial challenges and The Herald Sports Correspondent Jeffrey Murimbechi (JM) spoke to ZC board Chairman Peter Chingoka who addressed various issues including various allegations levelled against the board.
JM: Why has there been a recurrence of player strikes over payments in the last decade?
PC: There are different dynamics from ten years ago and today, ten years ago I would say it was a fight for who gets a larger piece of the cake between the top players and development.
We were trying to balance the two to ensure that there is enough money for development and players within the national team felt that they deserved a bigger slice of the cake.
In the last five years you find that the payers, understandably, are looking at short-term goals while as the board we are looking at the long-term and we have to see how we slice up the cake. We are looking after the national team, we are doing the franchises, provinces and club, schools and anything and everything to do with cricket.
We are trying to convert a formerly elitist sport into a national sport and in doing that including scholarship programmes, we take up a lot of funding – because of that you might be seen to be depriving other areas.
The current national players think that because they are the ones who are generating the revenue by participating in ICC events, therefore they should take first preference over development. But it has got to be a cycle because the current players also benefited from the same system and that’s how it should be.
We want to look for balance, yes, one must look after the welfare of the players, the welfare of administration staff and everybody around is taken care of whilst you are doing all this.
JM: On a managerial perspective can we say that ZC has failed to find a solution to its financial management problems by undertaking over ambitious projects to develop cricket?
PC: Over ambitious yes, in hindsight maybe, we have been over ambitious with some projects but I don’t believe that it is not justified with the development programme that we have because you can see that the sport has grown, in some cases it is arguably the second largest sport in the country and we want to continually grow the sport.
JM: Is there a plan or structure to get rid of these financial problems or at least mitigate against them in some way going forward?
PC: The financial model for all Test playing nations is based on a four-year cycle from World Cup to World Cup and you get your major event revenue in those four years and you build around that. Intermittently you have other events in between and you also have TV rights, but in our case the TV rights are only substantial when you play against India and you can’t get India to play against you all the time.
JM: With the current financial situation ZC is in, what is the future of cricket in Zimbabwe?
PC: From a financial point of view like I said it is a four-year model and we are trying to run ourselves into 2015. In between another major event, which is the T20 World Cup, is on. Working backwards, when we had the tour by India that was curtailed, that curtailment might have deprived us in the range of US$1.5m – US$1.6m and we have to come to terms with our current situation.
We talked about sponsors and I think it is the same for every other sport in the country and there is nothing we can do.
JM: The name Peter Chingoka has been blamed many times for all the cricket ills. What really is your position on this?
PC: My role is totally non-executive, the chairman obviously chairs board meetings and we monitor policies and strategies through the various committees that we have and I do not sit on any of those committees. There is a full management team that runs Zimbabwe Cricket and they have their various roles.
JM: There have been media reports about ZC seeking a financial bailout from the ICC, how far true is that?
PC: We have been talking to the ICC for assistance; the ICC does not only assist ZC but also helps other boards whom we shall not name. I hope that makes you understand that the problems we face are not unique to ZC alone; this is a very expensive sport to run. When we run tours like most countries, we are losing between US$700 000 – US$900 000 per tour, but it is only when you host India that you make money. Other countries make money when they host India as well.
We have been sanctioned, England has not been to Zimbabwe since 2004 and if you were to look at the number of tours Zimbabwe could have hosted England the amount of money we would have made would be sufficient, we would not even need a bank facility. If that had happened, we would not be talking about these financial problems.
JM: That being said, would cricket be profitable if Zimbabwe hosted such countries for tours?
PC: We can make it profitable and it is very easy to be profitable but what does that do to development? We would just run a very thin structure. If you take our annual accounts and strip out development programmes, take out the scholarship programme and take bits and pieces leaving only the national team doing the minimum – we can come out very profitable, but is that what you want?
Right now we have gone as deep as helping provincial associations to the point of running pay roles for franchises, where previously things like clubs were self-sufficient, we also have to prepare various grounds and take care of coaches at schools as part of our development programme.
JM: Why have you not trimmed operations down and taken austerity measures to run cricket?
PC: We have to find a balance and ask ourselves what are we aiming to do? If we want it to be an elitist sport it’s very easy, but we are not in that business, we are in the business of making it a national sport so it must come at a cost. The problem comes when you take a short-sighted view and look at immediate profit. It will look like it is falling, but if you take a longer term view you will see that it will look after itself as we go along just as big as it has in South Africa and other countries, then it will take care of itself.
You are not going to get the credits for it but in the long term it will be a bigger sport which is more robust and attracting more sponsorship.
We could have left things as they were in 2000 when we had 200 players and told ourselves that ‘it is fine we only need eleven players to make a national team for a match’, but now we are talking about thousands and that has only happened because of where we have come from.
The whole national team we have at the moment has come through the development programme, most of them were on the scholarship programme with the exception of [Brendan]Taylor and (Malcolm) Waller.
Online Reporter