MASHONALAND

Mashonaland Cricket Association general manager Gus Mackay has announced that PG Timbers will sponsor Mashonaland cricket this season, to the tune of Z$3.5 million. The sponsorship will include the Logan Cup team, which will be known officially as PG Timbers Mashonaland, and the Vigne Cup club competition, to be known as the PG Timbers Vigne Cup Cricket League. They will also sponsor the insertion of weekly results in the local newspaper, The Herald.

More on this can be found in the ZCO interview with Gus Mackay in this issue of ZCO.

MANICALAND (Thanks to general manager Kevan Barbour)

The Manicaland provincial association, under the guidance of full-time general manager Kevan Barbour, is making extended ground development plans throughout the province. They plan to build concrete centre pitches and practice nets, covered with Astroturf, at several schools in the Mutare area.

These schools in question will include former cricket-playing schools, junior and senior, as well as high-density schools. In the low-density suburbs the junior schools in question will be Chancellor, Baring and Hillcrest, which will feed pupils into Mutare Boys High and Hillcrest College, and in the high-density areas Sheni and Chirowakanwe junior schools which will feed Dangamvura. The MCA believes in the principle of continuity, ensuring that the link between junior and high schools is maintained so that the juniors will feed the high schools.

The MCA is also running coaching programmes in the high-density Mutare suburbs of Sakubva and Chikanga, sending coaches into various schools there. Unfortunately the facilities are very limited, allowing only soft-ball cricket to take place. Once concrete pitches are in place, they will be able to progress to playing with a hard ball. The lack of equipment is a major handicap; the Zimbabwe Cricket Union is conscious of this and is trying to obtain kit, but it is a huge and costly exercise.

At high-school level, a Centre of Excellence has been set up at Mutare Sports Club. The policy is to extract the cream from age-group teams at Under-13, Under-14, Under-16, Under-17 and Under-19 levels and take them to headquarters for more high-performance coaching, to form elite squads for the province.

In April and August each year ZCU is organizing inter-provincial tournaments for Under-13, Under-14, Under-16 and Under-19 players at various centres throughout the country. In April this year, the Under-13 tournament was at Hippo Valley, the Under-14 at Hillcrest in Mutare, the Under-16 at Falcon College and the Under-19 in Harare. The same venues were used in August, except that the Under-13s played at Bryden School near Chegutu. The Under-19 teams played two three-day games each, while the younger age-groups played three one-day games.

In each of these tournaments, a squad of 24 players was selected as potential candidates for the national age-group team. Their performances throughout the year will be closely monitored, and they will be invited to final trials for national selection late in the year, when the final 12 will be selected. This is a much better system than the previous one whereby trials were conducted over a single weekend without much assessment beforehand. Usually the national age-group teams play in the South African cricket weeks.

Mr Barbour emphasized the need for ZCU and the schools to co-operate to achieve this aim and thought it was going well. At Under-13 level six teams took part in the various tournaments: two each from Mashonaland and Matabeleland, and one each from Manicaland and Midlands/Masvingo. At higher levels there were only four teams, two from Mashonaland, one from Matabeleland and one from Zimbabwe Districts, which covered the rest of the country. Mr Barbour considered this unsatisfactory since there were such large geographical distances involved that satisfactory selection was impossible, and recommended at least a division into east and west.

Mutare Sports Club is suffering from a shortage of players at national league level. This year they have not had any CFX Academy students posted to play for the club and have to rely heavily on last year’s former Academy students, Leon Soma, Justin Lewis, Neil Ferreira and Richie Sims, the only players based fulltime in Mutare on professional contracts. Although they won a major victory in their first match, they have little depth and will have to play five schoolboys in their team this coming weekend.

MCA is continually running, through their office, courses for scorers, basic umpiring, groundsmen and coaching. They also have plans to develop cricket in Rusape and Chipinge. At Mvurachena Primary School near Chipinge, further south than Mutare on the eastern border, they plan to establish a centre of excellence, holding coaching workshops there two or three times a year, and including Chimanimani High School. A similar programme is planned for Rusape, on the road to Harare, where they plan for John Cowie and Highveld primary schools to feed Vengere High School.

They feel very restricted, though, due to lack of coaching staff. With this in mind, they have restricted their present plans to these two areas outside Mutare, deciding it is better to concentrate on doing two areas well rather than spreading the net and being unable to cope efficiently.

ZCU, in conjunction with MCA, are negotiating with Mutare City Council to extend the lease on the Mutare Sports Club ground. At present the lease is due to expire in 2014, but they want an extension at least to 2050. Kevan Barbour made a presentation to the full city council in April, and found them agreeable in principle. The lease will need to be fine-tuned before the final agreement is made.

Once security of tenure is ensured, ZCU will be able to plough funds into developing the ground to international standard, which is their aim. They hope for a sublease of a demarcated area, basically the cricket ground, from Mutare Sports Club, which also has facilities for rugby, hockey, tennis and squash. They want to improve the playing area and build a new pavilion, which will be an infrastructure controlled by ZCU, leaving the old pavilion for the use of the Sports Club members.

MCA are at present working on a basis of spending Z$60 000 a month to maintain the ground, before wages, and club subscriptions don’t begin to cover this sum. Once matters have been concluded satisfactorily with the city council, ZCU will be able to pump in the necessary money to make Mutare Sports Club a quality centre for cricket at all levels.

MIDLANDS (Thanks to general manager Ken Connelly)

Midlands cricket continues to expand, and a highlight will be the area’s first one-day international, which will be played against Kenya on 11 December. Weather permitting, of course!

There were eight sides participating in the Midlands domestic league, making it the largest league for many years. Pleasingly there were five development sides; namely, Kings Cricket Club, Christian Boys CC, Redcliff CC (all from Kwekwe), Gweru Sports Club and Rimuka Cricket Club from Kadoma. The other sides were Kwekwe Sports Club, Kwekwe Old Boys and Kwekwe Queens.

On the strength of the domestic league, Midlands have no fewer than five sides in National league for the season 2002/03. These are Kwekwe Sports Club (three teams), Kwekwe Queens and Gweru.

Midlands have contracted Donald Campbell as coach, and with players like Craig Wishart, Travis Friend, Raymond Price, Doug Marillier, Alester Maregwede and captain Dirk Viljoen they are hoping to do well in the Logan Cup.

Community-based development projects are to go up in Rimuka, Mbizo and Mkoba. A development officer will start on 1 October 2002.