The Guardian
13 October 2009
It took several painful years for Zimbabwean cricket to fall apart, but this summer the sport has started to recover
These last seven days have been something of a luxury, allowing a little peace, space and time into the cricket calendar while the Champions League bubbles away in India. There was one international match yesterday, but it was not the kind that makes headlines. At the Sports Club ground in downtown Harare, among the jacaranda trees and in front of the old gabled pavilion, Zimbabwe played Kenya, and beat them by 91 runs.
It is almost four years now since Zimbabwe withdrew from Test cricket, and four years too since the Logan Cup, the country’s first class competition, was suspended for the first time in its 104-year history because of a lack of funding. It took several painful years for Zimbabwean cricket to fall apart, but this summer, with surprising swiftness, the sport has started to recover. For the first time in a long time, the news from Zimbabwe is good. The decay of the game reflected the rotting of the Zimbabwean society as a whole. In fact the two were explicitly linked, as the men in charge of the hopelessly inept, and corrupt, Zimbabwe Cricket Union had close links to Zanu PF. Now, as Zimbabwean society starts to rebuild itself, competitive cricket is also on the mend.
The improvement is due, in part, to David Coltart, Zimbabwe’s new Minister for Education, Sports, Art and Culture. Coltart, a human rights lawyer, was a founding member of the Movement for Democratic Change, and took on his new role when the coalition government was sworn-in last February. Many aspects of Zimbabwean life remain in the control of Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF, but cricket is not one of them.
Coltart is a cricket tragic. The kind of man who checks the county cricket scorecards to see how his favourite players are performing – “when I see Sean Ervine’s averages for Hampshire,” he said recently, “I say to myself, here is a guy who should be playing for us.” Coltart singled out the cricket team as ambassadors for the transition taking place in Zimbabwe. He visited the dressing room during their recent one-day series against Bangladesh, and told them, in the words of captain Propser Utseya, that “they should not take representing the country lightly, that it was an honour and a privilege, that he believed in us. It helped.”
Coltart has spoken frankly of his “legitimate concerns” about the allegations of corruption and racism in the governing of the sport. “I have engaged Zimbabwe Cricket; I am in possession of the ICC mandated audit report which I have studied,” he said in a recent interview with The Zimbabwean. “I have had a series of meetings with ZC and they have agreed with me that corruption should not be tolerated and racism and regionalism cannot be tolerated. This is a transition. We are naive if we think everything is going to change overnight, that all the problems are going to be addressed overnight, it is a process and that process also applies to sport and I think that if one focuses on cricket there has been a material improvement since February.”
Most heartening has been the return of several of the men who helped make Zimbabwean cricket what it once was. Three former Test captains, Alistair Campbell, Heath Streak and Dave Houghton, have taken on roles within the governing body, bringing their accumulated knowledge and expertise to the task of reviving the sport. Campbell has been appointed Chairman of the cricket committee, while Heath Streak is expected to take up the role national coach and Houghton is the director of coaching. Domestically, a franchise system has been put in place.
Until recently, the notion of competitive domestic cricket in Zimbabwe was a sham, with players being bussed out from Harare to form ropey scratch XIs to contest matches nobody watched. Now, the five teams contesting the league have strong regional identities, and employ 15 professional players each. In a sign of their burgeoning good health, the Mashonaland Eagles have signed up Chris Silverwood to act as player/coach, while Houghton has brought in another former English Test player, Mike Hendrick, to act as bowling coach to the national team. The canker has not been entirely cut out.
Board chairman Peter Chingoka, who was banned from entering Australia and England to attend ICC meetings because of his links to Zanu PF, is still hovering around. But he seems to have been denuded of his power. “He’s yesterday’s man,” one Zimbabwean administrator told Cricinfo in September. “He is associated internally and abroad with the dark days of the game here and his time is thankfully drawing to a close.”
A structure for youth cricket is in place and, according to Ozias Bvute, managing director of ZC, “young cricketers are falling out of the sky like mangoes fall out of the trees in the wet season.” And while his words should be taken with a pinch of salt, excellent self-publicist as he is, the signs are that he is right when he says that ZC is working towards the ideal “of an inclusive cricket structure that gives every child an opportunity to play, regardless of creed, race or gender.”
The scorecards for Zimbabwe’s series against Kenya show a balanced, racially diverse, and talented team. When Hamilton Masakadza scored a Test century on his debut in 2000, he was the first black player ever to make a ton for Zimbabwe. Now the team has a multiethnic core, including Maskadza, Utseya and Stuart Matsikinyeri. Alongside them at the heart of the new team are off spinner Ray Price, who has returned from county cricket, Brendon Taylor and Mark Vermeulen, who has been rehabilitated after his deranged attempts to burn down ZC’s headquarters (an extraordinary story which you can read more about in this excellent interview by the Telegraph’s Ian Chadband).
“ZC makes no apology for the fact that there was a policy of affirmative action before,” Campbell told the BBC recently. “There are 13 million black people in Zimbabwe and you’re not going to will that away – they had to become more integrated.” It was the implementation of the policy that was so disastrously wrong, “When you get cricketing decisions made by non-cricketers, that is what happens.” Now the right people are in place, from the top down, and Campbell for one thinks that “In two or three years we will be good enough to get back and compete at Test cricket.” “Bygones” he added, “need to be bygones.”
Extract taken from The Spin, guardian.co.uk/sport’s weekly take on the world of cricket.