South Africa vs Zimbabwe

Quoted from admin in post #46362

Quoted from zimbos_05 in post #46357

Quoted from Pat_Bee in post #46344

Not sure what match you watched bro 😂😂 Wez bossed it like usual, supporting Marumani, and Myers had to consolidate after Curran gave it away 😂

Can't tell if this is satire or serious. Wez bossed it? Like usual?

I'm so sick and tired of accepting mediocrity with this team.

We are the architects of our own problems, regularly. We relied too much on Raza, Ervine, Williams, we had no progression plan. Bennett and Curran have done a job, but the rest have had countless chances and they have failed. So what did we do, we went to Taylor and Cremer. 2 guys who were out of the game for years and we expect them to be at the International level.

Then you say Curran threw away his wicket? he got us off to a good start, a start to build on. He did his job and the guy to go strong in the powerplay. Yeah it was a bit of a silly shot, but it was one where he was able to play it. No wickets down, and we had a decent amount of runs on the board.

So sick of this racist bullshit.

😂😂😂 don't let Pat_Bee get to you like that. If you track all his posts, you will see an obvious pattern. Trolling white Zimbabweans is kind of his shtick. Kind of like a sardonic version of Zolsky.

I am all for free speech and I do find some of his posts funny. But I understand that his idea of "humour" may not be everyone's cup of tea. I will add a Mute feature soon. If you think certain forum members raise your blood pressure, you should be able to just mute them and get on with it.

Btw, I agree with most of what you said, zimbos. Our standards simply aren’t high enough for us to consistently compete with and beat the stronger international sides.

The administration deserves a fair amount of blame for that, particularly when it comes to development, succession planning and creating a system that consistently produces international-quality players.

But I also think the problem is cultural.

Zimbabwe cricket doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a small reflection of the country around it. We have become far too accustomed to mediocrity, poor standards and things simply not working properly. Things that should be unacceptable gradually become normal, and once they become normal, the standard against which everything else is judged drops with them.

You see it everywhere. Poor infrastructure becomes normal. 80+ people dying in a boating accident and a further 14 or so in a road accident (both of which should not be happening in a country with high standards) in the space of a month and nobody bats an eyelid because it's been normalised. Corruption and nepotism become normal. People learn to celebrate basic competence because competence itself has become unusual.

Cricket is not magically insulated from that environment.
So when an average performances get treated like something extraordinary, or when players are repeatedly selected despite years of mediocre returns, I don’t think that mentality appeared inside Zimbabwe cricket by accident. It reflects a much broader culture of lowered expectations.

The national team is, in many ways, a microcosm of Zimbabwe itself.
Until we become less tolerant of mediocrity and start demanding higher standards, from administrators, coaches, selectors and players alike, I don’t see why we should expect the results to be dramatically different. But hey, demanding higher standards is kind of a crime is in this neck of the woods.

Quoted from admin in post #46491

Hey Tom, I finally got around to answering your question. It's a longie, but I'll give you the TL;DR version first. If you have more time to waste, you can read the rest.

TL;DR version: Pakistan, South Africa, Bangladesh etc. all have their issues, but Zimbabwe has very little margin for institutional stupidity because we have a substantially smaller player pool and don't produce elite international cricketers at the same rate as some of the countries you mentioned.

That's the whole argument in a nutshell. You don't need to read past this if you have more important things to do.

Now for the detailed version:

1. Small Player Pool

If you look across the decades, Zimbabwe probably produces only one or two genuinely world class, or close to world-class, cricketers in each generation.

In the 1980s you had Dave Houghton and arguably Kevin Curran. In the 1990s, Andy Flower and Heath Streak. Murray Goodwin and Neil Johnson were Zimbabwean, of course, but much of their development took place in Australia and South Africa. In the 2000s you had Brendan Taylor, Colin de Grandhomme and Sean Williams, although Williams really became an outstanding international batsman later in his career. In the 2010s you had Blessing Muzarabani, Gary Ballance and perhaps Richard Ngarava, who I don't think is world class yet but is getting closer. Does Craig Ervine deserve a mention here? Maybe, but I don't think he was world class.

Who is the equivalent player from the 2020s? Brian Bennett might become one, but he is still young and needs consistency. Brad Evans is a solid cricketer, but has a long way to go before he is world class. Newman could get there one day and I hope he does. However, there is a genuine possibility that Zimbabwe reaches the end of this decade without producing a single truly world class cricketer. That's actually quite terrifying.

That brings me to the second problem.

2. Winning on the Cricket Field Is Not Zimbabwe Cricket's Only Objective

Winning cricket matches has not always been Zimbabwe Cricket's only institutional objective.

Everybody knows that since the early 2000s, cricket policy has at various points been shaped by the country's broader socio-political priorities, particularly racial transformation. Whatever one thinks about the justification for those policies, merit often had to make way to accommodate them, and that had a negative impact on results on the field.

I certainly cannot prove that there is currently a formal quota system. But I don't really need to, because there probably aren't enough white players left in Zimbabwe cricket for quotas to be necessary anyway.

The consequences of the earlier period, however, did not disappear overnight. Zimbabwe lost players, families, coaches, administrators, clubs, schools and decades of accumulated cricket knowledge. In a country with such a tiny cricketing population, that loss matters enormously.

Which brings me to the third problem.

3. Talent Identification, Development and Retention

If Zimbabwe is only going to produce a handful of international quality players in each generation, then Zimbabwe Cricket has to be exceptionally good at identifying them early and developing them efficiently. The margin for error is razor thin.

If you invest heavily in the wrong player, you don't only lose the money. You lose time. Perhaps most importantly, you lose the opportunity to invest those resources in somebody else.

Take Tashinga Musekiwa as an example. Zimbabwe Cricket clearly sees something in him and has invested heavily in his development. He has been given a decent run in international cricket and additional development opportunities (didn't he go to Pakistan on a PSL development contract or something?). So far, that investment has not translated into international performances. That doesn't mean Musekiwa can never become a good player. I genuinely hope he does. The same goes for Clive Madande.

However, when you're Zimbabwe, you cannot afford too many development bets that fail to produce international cricketers. Every dollar, tour, coaching opportunity and international match invested in one player is an opportunity that could potentially have gone towards developing laaities like Matty Campbell, Panashe Taruvinga, Matty Welch or another promising youngster.

This is why comparisons with Pakistan and South Africa don't quite line up.

Pakistan's administration is a complete circus right now. At the moment they resemble a particularly bad episode of Monday Night Raw from the Attitude Era. Coaches going, players being dropped, selectors changing, drama everywhere. And yet Pakistan will still probably beat Zimbabwe more often than not. Why? Because their player pool is enormous. Pakistan can waste talented players and another Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi or Mohammad Rizwan can emerge from somewhere else in the system. Zimbabwe does not have that luxury.

The same applies to South Africa. South Africa can lose Kevin Pietersen and still have AB de Villiers, Hashim Amla and Dale Steyn. Their cricketing population, schools structure and domestic player pool are so much larger that they can absorb inefficiency that would devastate Zimbabwe.

The exact same administrative mistake therefore costs Zimbabwe far more than it costs South Africa or Pakistan.

Zimbabwe occasionally produces elite players too. The problem is that we don't produce enough of them, and when we do, we haven't always been particularly good at keeping them. Gary Ballance ended up playing Test cricket for England. Colin de Grandhomme became a major part of New Zealand's Test side. Tawanda Muyeye has chosen to pursue his cricket in England. That is devastating for a cricket country as small as Zimbabwe. The whole point of becoming a Test nation was partly to create a cricket environment capable of retaining our best players. Instead, some of the best players Zimbabwe produces still end up contributing to other cricket systems.

So my argument is essentially this:

Zimbabwe has a very small elite-player pool.
Zimbabwe Cricket has historically pursued objectives other than simply maximising cricket performance.
The combination of those things contributes to poor talent conversion, wasted development resources and talent loss.

Zimbabwe simply cannot afford institutional leakages. We need to be better than Pakistan or South Africa at identifying and developing talent because we have far less talent available to waste. Instead, we often operate within the same broader Zimbabwean institutional culture where merit competes with kinship, political proximity and other interests.

That was really the point I was making earlier when I said the national team is a microcosm of the country. Zimbabwe Cricket is not completely dysfunctional. They clearly do try to develop players, improve facilities and keep the game alive. The challenge is that they are operating within the same political and institutional environment as everything else in Zimbabwe. When your player pool is this small, even modest amounts of inefficiency have enormous consequences.

Personally, I've more or less accepted that this is how things are. Changing it would mean confronting issues that go far beyond cricket and into the foundations of how the country itself operates. I have neither the power nor the appetite for that. So I'll continue watching. I'll celebrate every five-for Blessing takes and every hundred Bennett scores. If Musekiwa scratches together 15, I'll probably celebrate that too. Not because I have a fondness for mediocrity, but because he's still wearing Zimbabwe colours and he's one of us. It's not as though the bloke walks out there intending to fail.