U19 World Cup | South Africa | Jan-Feb 2024

[secretzimbo]

It’s basically been a modern miracle till now Zimbabwe have done well with such a pool.

True
For example, Ireland has over 100 active cricket clubs. They recently reached the target of 50,000 participants across all categories/levels, with junior boys making up a large percentage.
Scotland has a similar number of clubs and participants.

Namibia I think has an even smaller pool than us but it's of decent quality as a lot of it is in South Africa. At least we beat them, I suppose!

[secretzimbo]

I think we said numerous times before the tournament started that really the only expectation was to beat Namibia. They achieved that, so they should be pleased.

It was disappointing how poor we were with the bat in the other games, definitely.

This tournament format is rubbish though. In the old format we would have had 1 or 2 extra placing games in the Plate against more similar teams and thats when we would have seen some better performances. In truth none of our boys were likely to do anything amazing against the likes of England, Australia and South Africa. Our previous teams had more matches against lower sides so it's difficult to compare this squad with those.

It's a 12th place finish which is the same as 2022 and generally in line with what our teams have done consistently since 2008.

We haven''t had a top 10 finish at this tournament in the past 18 years. it really is no wonder that we are't a top 10 team at senior level. We won't be the foreseeable future by the looks of things.

We've said it a hundred times but there has to be more effort going into our junior cricket at an earlier age. It was admirable how much preparation and cricket this squad had over the pst 18 months but especially for batters the effort has to happen sooner. We need similar programmes for u14, u16 etc.

Nyamhuri & Taruvinga are pretty much the only ones who performed well throughout and shown they might have something to offer. Simbi too. Kamwemba and Patel might have half a chance of making it too but they need much more work.

[jw2]

That was embarrassing. Not our finest moment.

I think it was a disgraceful act of appallingly bad sportsmanship. The umpire should have rejected the appeal out of hand; the batsman was clearly obstructing nobody.

[ZIMDOGGY]

I don’t know what went on but rules are rules and all major leagues in pro sport will push every law to its boundary for an edge
It’s unsustainable for cricket to keep expecting these gentlemanly type behaviour from all going forward.
Too many cultures, conflicting opinions and careers on the line.
Sport just has to be ruled based and anything goes within the confines of those rules.

[Crastle_cog]

100 percent agree.

[ZIMDOGGY]

It’s basically been a modern miracle till now Zimbabwe have done well with such a pool.

True
For example, Ireland has over 100 active cricket clubs. They recently reached the target of 50,000 participants across all categories/levels, with junior boys making up a large percentage.
Scotland has a similar number of clubs and participants.

Namibia I think has an even smaller pool than us but it's of decent quality as a lot of it is in South Africa. At least we beat them, I suppose!

That is basically the pool you need if you want any sort of sustained success. There is some scope within those numbers. For example Bangladesh, where the average height of a man is 5'2 and are a country who have literally never produced a medal winning athlete in the history of the olympics will need a lot higher pool to produce athletes to compete internationally, as compared to countries that more readily produce athletes like Jamaica and Australia. Zimbabwe will need to get toward that 50k mark to stand any chance.
That figure would be 80% social cricketers you'd think?
Zim dont seem to have a huge social cricket scene so that needs to be taken into consideration, but what numbers are we at?
Across schools, clubs, first class....2000?

[Googly]

I'd be surprised if it was as much as 2000.
The problem is we're still regressing, there are few people playing it at school level and only a handful of schools.

I don't know where bottom is, but we're absolutely not there yet. I don't think there is a bottom. As it gets worse less and less schoolboys play. Grass roots is a figment of ZC's imagination.
For me it's a top down approach. We need to look after our top 20 players and somehow win some games.
Then we need to hold hands and pray for a government that turns our economy around and a ZC that employs some good people and gets rid of the dead wood

[secretzimbo]

So I was looking through the ZC App, which is very good and chronicles probably about 80% of all the cricket that happens at all in the country at all levels.

Within the past six months the following high schools have all played some sort of cricket:
CBC, Churchill, Domboshava Munyariwi Girls, Falcon, Glenwood, Goromonzi High, Harare High Girls, Hellenic, Kyle College, Lomagundi, Lord Malvern, Mabvuku, Midland Christian, Milton, Peterhouse, Petra, Prince Edward, St John’s, St George’s, Watershed, Wise Owl.

About 20 high schools and The App shows about 45 primary schools are active.

In reality only about 6 of these high schools have decent coaches or facilities. The rest is very very low level recreational/‘fun’ cricket. That doesn’t impact any of the stuff we talk about or notice on a forum like this, but the more the merrier etc. ZC has a remit (including its ICC allocation) for participation as much as high performance.

But even some of the ‘good’ cricket schools are in decline. Churchill, PE and St George’s cricket programmes are a shadow of what they were even a few years ago. But then cricket just mirrors the wider school. Most of our schools are still on the decline as a whole.

The question has to be how do you shore up the top quality remaining cricket schools to ensure they continue to produce players - or produce MORE or BETTER players - whilst also trying to widen the net. You can’t be an elite high performance world class cricket country with 6 schools ffs.
There has to be some sort of well defined long-term plan to take 2-3 of those ‘fringe’ schools listed above and implement high quality cricket programmes there too. There has to be a facilities fund and more importantly COACHES.

Coaches are absolutely number 1. They need to be the very top priority for ZC, at basically all levels.
Without coaches you have nothing.
We need lots and lots and lots of Level 1’s to take care of the grassroots stuff and spread the joy of cricket to the masses and oversee the recreational and fun cricket.

Then we need seriously a lot more higher quality level 2s and 3s. We have nowhere near enough, and many of the coaches we do have, well their qualifications and certainly their methods are questionable. We’ve lost countless good quality school coaches in the past decade.

[TapsC2]

And somehow they think building a stadium in Vic falls is the way to go. They need to wake up. That money could solve a lot of the problems we talk about.

[Kriterion_BD]

That is basically the pool you need if you want any sort of sustained success. There is some scope within those numbers. For example Bangladesh, where the average height of a man is 5'2 and are a country who have literally never produced a medal winning athlete in the history of the olympics will need a lot higher pool to produce athletes to compete internationally, as compared to countries that more readily produce athletes like Jamaica and Australia.

Very true. Well almost . Slight correction, the average height of a Bangladeshi man in my father's generation (of famine, malnutrition, and extreme poverty) was 5'4". My own cohort of US born/raised guys and the average height improved significantly to 5'8". In height, Bangladeshis tend to be clustered around the median...very little deviation either way, and even then 95% of people seem to be 1 standard deviation above or below the median/mean. Which is statistically odd, because in a normally distributed (aka bell curve), only 68% of the data falls in 1 standard deviation +/1. Of course it just mean in Bangladesh the standard deviation is probably just very small - we're *all* basically the same height!

Although, the present day Bangladesh national team probably has a mean or median height of around 5'9", and more important almost all of the seamers are above 6 feet. The thing that stands out is that we don't have any giants that almost every other team has like Jansen, Jamieson, Muzurabani, Shaheen, Holder. But the average height isn't too bad anymore if we look at the currently contracted and capped players in descending order:

Rishad Hossain - 6'4"
Shoriful Islam - 6'3"
Khaled Ahmed - 6'2"
Taskin Ahmed - 6'2"
Ebadat Hossain - 6'1"
Mahmudullah - 5'11"
Najmul Shanto - 5'10"
Tamim Iqbal - 5'10"
Soumya Sarkar - 5'10"
Shakib al Hasan - 5'9"
Tanzim Hasan Sakib - 5'9"
Liton Das - 5'8"
Taijul Islam - 5'5"
Mehidy Miraz - 5'4"
Mushfiqur Rahim - 5'3"
Mominul Haque - 5'3"

Not sure of a couple of the newer guys like Towhid Hridhoy and Tanzid Hasan Tamim...I'm fairly sure they are 5'8" or shorter as they look like pretty short guys.

The other thing is, Bangladeshis are naturally very lean. No fat on us. A little gym time and we can get shredded. Most of the guys listed have 6 packs, even if they don't appear to be body-builders. Very few dad bods or beer bellies. A lot of the guys have good raw athleticism as well.