We needed a little bit of luck: Chawaguta

TUSKERS head coach, Walter Chawaguta, said he feels like his side needed some luck to go their way after a disappointing 2024/25 domestic season, which concluded on Saturday.

The Bulawayo side anchored the Logan Cup standings with one win, four defeats and three draws from eight matches while in the Pro50 Championship, they were second from bottom with three wins, and three draws while the other two matches were washed out.

Chawaguta believes things could have gone better than they did if they had some luck on their side and weather permitting. Tuskers had some games washed out in both the Logan Cup and Pro50 Championship. He also conceded that another cause of their disappointing campaign was losing games that they should have comfortably won.

“We needed a little bit of luck to go our way, but obviously the weather was against us. I think 40 percent of our games were rained off. So, if you do look at our Logan Cup, we only lost a few games while some of them were rained off. We won one. So, it’s been a very disappointing season for us, especially with the talent that’s in the team.

“And the Pro50 as well, we could have done better. We lost games that we should have won and it all comes down to application and especially in the batting department, application and just making smart decisions. And I don’t think we were up to it this season,” said Chawaguta.

Despite a disappointing campaign, Chawaguta was pleased with the way batters fared. In the Logan Cup, Tanunurwa Makoni, Tafara Mupariwa, Hamid Ali, Will Fraine and Nkosana Mpofu managed to score centuries and a number of fifties.

There were also half centuries from Luke Jongwe, Brian Chari and Sean Williams. Chawaguta said it’s a sign that batters are getting in but they need to go all the way and score big.

“The batting has been good, whenever we have stepped out, we have got guys that have stepped up and scored hundreds on a fairly regular basis. But, we have just not been able to take 20 wickets up until maybe the last two games. It has been a struggle, so that’s an area we need to work on, but I think the batting has come right again. We have batters that are in decent form that have come and got a lot of 50s, 60s, 70s, not a lot of hundreds but it’s a sign that our batters are getting in, we are just not going to score big with an exception of a few games where we have had big scores,” he said.

It is back to the drawing board for Tuskers ahead of the domestic T20 Cup, which is scheduled to start on March 24. — @brandon_malvin