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Makhaya Ntini

ZIMBABWE lost both the one-day international (ODI) and Twenty20 International series against a second-string Indian side, but coach Makhaya Ntini voiced confidence that his players had it in them to revive cricket in the country.

The numbers in the last one year indicate a steep decline in fortunes for Zimbabwe. They have won only eight of their 28 ODIs in the period and have lost as many as 14 of their 21 T20Is as well. It includes two ODI and T20I series losses each to Afghanistan, a country that has gone past Zimbabwe in both the ICC ODI and T20I rankings.

Ntini, however, took confidence from Zimbabwe’s improvement in the three T20Is against India and said it was only a matter of belief.

“You look at the team where it was, from the ODIs to get to the T20s. There’s so much improvement, the energy,” he said on Wednesday.

“You’ve seen the guys running around, diving around, and believing in themselves. They get in the situation where they just need that 10 percent of belief for them to go through. When you get to the situation where you think you’re almost through the line, becoming a hero, create a history, it just needs a little bit of push for us. We want to see guys coming back here and fill up the stadiums. The cricket that was played today tells that there’s so much this country can do.”

Ntini, however, shot down suggestions that Zimbabwe were heading towards becoming an only-T20 country, stressing that Tests were the way forward.

“This is a Test nation country,” he emphasised. “We can’t really close our opportunities and only believe on one side of an inning. T20 is just an entertaining game. We need to build (players) to believe that they will be able to play any game. There’s Tests coming up against New Zealand and Sri Lanka, so if we only play T20s, how can we improve ourselves and keep our Test status?

“We know that this country shouldn’t have to go and play qualifiers. This is where we are building them. That challenge isn’t going to be just for a night. We want to make sure that everything we give them, they believe that they can do better. We’re not in a position where we need to look very far ahead of us. Game-by-game, day-by-day trying to win and get in the position of believing in themselves.”

The former South African pacer hinted that the next big challenge for Zimbabwe was to get into the World Cup 2019 without having to go through a qualifier round. For that, said Ntini, Zimbabwe needed to find and groom players who were “willing” to take them forward come what may.

“We need to find those who are willing to take us forward,” he said. “We need to find those players who are concentrating just on winning. We need to find those who believe that they can bat the whole day. This is what we are trying to put to them. You look at countries like West Indies. Last night they were 30 for 3 (against Australia), what happened after that? (Marlon) Samuels scored a 100, (Denesh) Ramdin 91. They walked in and believed. It doesn’t matter if we lose three wickets up front, because we have lot of time to build. This is what we want to create in Zimbabwe, whereby the senior players take the responsibility instead of just going in and playing the same shot as the other one who has just got out. That’s what we want to achieve here.”

“We’ve got Lance Klusener here; we all know that he is one of the greatest cricketers of all time. By having him here, the little guys and the youngsters are coming in. We’re now chasing the 2019 World Cup. When 2019 comes, we don’t want to see Zimbabwe playing qualifiers, we want to see Zimbabwe going straight to the top 10. You see guys like (Peter) Moor coming in, we’ve got Timycen, I can count 11 without even putting Hamilton (Masakadza), Vusi (Sibanda) and Elton (Chigumbura). That’s where we’re looking at. But they can’t just jump in, they need to be groomed. How do you groom them? By having them batting with Elton. When Elton is standing on the other side and says you’re good enough, you can do this, he doesn’t panic. But the moment he doesn’t get that information from the other side, he panics because he’s a youngster. We build day-by-day, player-by-player. The team that we have is a good team, a team that can take any country.” — Wisden India