Zimbabwe must compete

I expect ruthlessness without compromising on the basics.

ICC:

Many people, including me, have spoken about the desire for Zimbabwe to be ‘competitive’ during the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015. No doubt that can be interpreted as a euphemism for wishing to avoid heavy defeats, but it is not. If a team is ‘competitive’, then it stands to reason that they can win. Nobody can win if they are not competing.

For Zimbabwe to be competitive requires everyone to contribute rather than two or three players producing outstanding, individual performances. Even if the likes of Brendan Taylor, Hamilton Masakadza or Elton Chigumbura do grab the headlines, the team will still falter if the rest of the players don’t do the basics well.

We have always been in that situation and we faced up to that reality. The players looked at the superstars in the world game and knew we couldn’t match them – with respect to Dave Houghton, Andy Flower and Heath Streak who were in a different class to the rest of us. But we knew that the sum of our parts could be much greater than the individual pieces if we worked hard and did the basics well.

South Africa, obviously, will be a very hard opening game. If they play to their best ability then they should win. But if we capitulate and lose control of our basic disciplines then it could make life difficult for the remaining games. They may be a team of world class individuals, but they will also be nervous – every team will be before their first game. I hope we remember that it is a game between bat and ball and don’t think about the ‘names’ and reputations.

Defeat against the UAE, however, will be completely unacceptable. Zimbabwe is a Test nation and we should never be embarrassed by associate nations. Without compromising the ‘stick to basics’ philosophy, I fully expect a degree of ruthlessness from the team.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2015.

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