Once again, the Zimbabwe national team flattered only to deceive. They gave the impression, in the Third and final Test match against Sri Lanka, that they were going to make a real fight of it, by avoiding the follow-on and therefore what would have been another innings defeat.

Then, on that hideous fourth day, they lost their last five second-innings wickets for just six runs, allowed Sri Lanka to run up 212 at more than five runs an over and declare, and then rolled over on their backs to be bowled out for 79. They can't play much worse than that. But don't bet on it.

Sri Lanka are a very powerful team at home, where they can face any team in the world with great confidence. Much of their supremacy here is due to the genius of Muttiah Muralitharan, who took 30 of the 60 Zimbabwean wickets to fall at an average of 9.80. Murali is Sri Lanka's bowling almost as much as Andy Flower is Zimbabwe's batting. With Andy's great purple patch coming to an abrupt end, which I hear is causing him much personal heart-searching, Zimbabwe's batting lost its foundation.

It seems that coach Geoff Marsh's years in charge of the brash Australians have not prepared him for handling the Zimbabweans, with their fragile confidence. Perhaps at present, with the country and the game in the country alike racked by politics, there is little he or anybody else can do about our underperforming players. But hopefully he can get through to some of our players that they can and should be performing better.

Captain Stuart Carlisle can come out of the tour with reasonable credit; he at least, with an average of 27, improved his Test record slightly. He even stood in as opening batsman in the final Test, after Hamilton Masakadza had left for the Under-19 World Cup, and scored 64 and 28, the latter by far the highest of that miserable 79. Trevor Gripper alone of the other batsmen emerged with any real credit, with a record slightly better than that of Carlisle.

None of our bowlers have anything to be proud of. Heath Streak had the best record – seven wickets at an average of 43! He also topped the batting, with an average of 39, but that was helped by three not-out innings. So our best bowling average was higher than our best batting average! A team has to be badly beaten for the statistics to be as bad as that.

For Sri Lanka, all their batsmen averaged over 40, and all their bowlers better than 36. Sri Lanka's average innings total was 614, Zimbabwe's was 191. Zimbabwe has fully maintained its record against Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka: Test matches, lost seven out of seven (one, as no Zimbabwean will ever forget, due to the disgraceful umpiring rather than the opposition); one-day internationals, lost nine out of nine.

There is no escaping it at the moment: Zimbabwe (and obviously Bangladesh as well) are not playing well enough at the moment to merit Test status. Bangladesh at least can claim inexperience and can be expected to improve. We will not lose it – there is no provision for that on grounds of performance. But we have been overwhelmed so often recently in both Tests and one-day internationals that the implications can be serious. What attitude will the television companies take towards televising Zimbabwean matches when so many of them are completely uncompetitive? Most of the revenue in Zimbabwe cricket comes from this source.

Zimbabwe had a far better start to Test cricket than Bangladesh, who at the time of writing now seem to be losing their tenth of their first eleven Test matches; they have just one draw when rain saved them from probable defeat against Zimbabwe. By way of contrast, Zimbabwe beat Pakistan in their eleventh Test match, which came after six draws and only four defeats.

Then, inexperienced as we were, we were competitive, even though we didn't win much. We fought all the way, through brilliant fielding, accurate bowling and dogged batting. We played better then than we are doing now – we certainly put up more of a fight! We weren't even bowled out for less than 100 until that 63 (chasing 99 to win) against West Indies two years ago. Since then, we have kept plumbing new depths.

The two Flowers, Alistair Campbell, Guy Whittall and Heath Streak were all core members of those early teams, and all are still playing today. But, apart from Andy Flower (and Heath Streak with the bat, but not the ball), the others are performing less well today than they did then! All apart from Andy were under the age of 25 at the time of that first Test victory. They were young then and should be in their prime now. Yet they are not. And we have not found players even to equal their disappointing recent records yet.

It is a situation seemingly impossible to understand. I can outline the problems, but neither I nor anybody else seems able to find adequate reasons, let alone solutions. It all adds up to the fact that Zimbabwe cricket is in big trouble – and the most infuriating thing is that it need not be so. We do have the talent to compete. Somehow, with most players, the heart and/or head do not seem to be in it. We need to get back that old commitment that we had when we first ventured into Test cricket.

Finally, note that it was the curse of the eighth wicket that struck once again after Zimbabwe had Sri Lanka under reasonable control in their first innings. It is incredible how often an eighth-wicket stand turns a match for the opposition and how hard our bowlers find it to bowl string sides out after making good starts.

THE BOARD XI

I have just been in Kwekwe to watch our experienced Board XI, with six Test players in their ranks, take on Gauteng B, who had only four players with first-class experience behind them, and not much of that. My match reports can be found on the main Zimbabwe cricket page.

The matches were notable most of all for the superb batting of Alistair Campbell. He scored two centuries in the three-day match and a rapid fifty in the one-dayer. Although the bowling was not testing, it was energetic and enthusiastic, and he played scarcely a false shot in scoring more than 300 runs over the weekend. He is keen to go to India with the national side next month, and it is scarcely conceivable now that he will not be chosen, especially after the debacle in Sri Lanka. Perhaps now that he was actually dropped for the first time in his career, we may indeed see a permanently more determined and high-scoring Campbell at international level. He certainly made it plain last weekend that he can bat like that. We live in hope.

Otherwise the Board XI won both matches by large margins, as should have been expected. A glance at the scorecards will show that in the three-day game that was deceptive. Gauteng led on first innings, were ahead for all of the first seven sessions of the match, and only lost when, lulled into a false sense of security by the substandard play of the Board XI, they set a too-easy target.

I got the impression that the Board XI began the match with gross overconfidence. Gauteng are surprisingly one of the weakest South African provinces at present, and this was their B side, composed almost entirely of inexperienced young hopefuls, including several teenagers. The Board players may have thought that all they had to do to win was to turn up and would never be seriously tested.

Certainly the atmosphere on the field as Gauteng batted first suggested this. There was a great deal of the cynical `encouragement' of bowlers, a farmyard of noises supposedly aimed at boosting their own side but quite obviously with the purpose of intimidating the opposition. It wasn't pleasant, but to their great credit Gauteng refused to roll over. What they lacked in experience they made up for in heart and purpose – much like Zimbabwe in our early-Test days – and they fought hard.

The Board XI must have been quite taken by surprise to concede over 300 on first innings, but once a miscalculation in attitude has been recognized it is not always easy to put it right. Were it not for Campbell, whose only worthy partner was Dirk Viljoen, they would really have been in trouble. Even in the second innings they could not put the Gauteng batsmen under much pressure as they sought a declaration.

When the closure came, setting a target to 312 at exactly four an over, I said immediately to the others in the press/scorebox, "We'll walk this." I had seen it happen before – indeed it happened in the Board's first match of the season, against North West – when a challenging target rescues a Zimbabwean team which has come unstuck against opposition to whom they really feel quite superior. I was quite confident our batsmen, faced with less threatening bowlers than Murali, would be able to put it all together and win with ease, and I remained confident even when rain changed four an over to almost six an over.

So some aspects of Zimbabwean cricket are quite predictable! Unfortunately, lowering their game to the standard of the opposition seems to happen regularly for our Board XI, and it is not fully compensated for by their ability to chase targets. After all, the word will spread among the provinces, and we will not always bat last. We need to be convincing throughout a match if we are to persuade a reluctant South African Board to promote us to their SuperSport series.

Finally, spare a thought for Bulawayo left-arm spinner Ian Engelbrecht. He was selected for the twelve to play Northerns in Mutare a few weeks back, left out of the curtailed three-day match and included in the one-dayer, only for it to be abandoned without a ball being bowled. He had no chance to prove his worth, and was dropped from the side to play in Kwekwe. Discouraged, he is now on his way to England to try to further his career there, according to Derrick Townshend's Matabeleland report. It is unfortunate that he could not see his way to applying for the CFX Academy this year, but he is another young player getting away.

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