Zimbabwe national cricket team coach Dave Houghton has revealed that he was left embarrassed by his team’s performance in their crashing seven wicket defeat to Namibia in their opening match of the International Cricket Council (ICC) T-20 World Cup qualifier Africa Region on Wednesday.
Houghton had said that he expected the Chevrons to win all six matches at this qualifier where Zimbabwe are the only ICC full member.
But the Chevrons struggled with both bat and ball to surrender the points.
Zimbabwe lost the toss and were sent in to bat where the opening pair of Nick Welch (6) and Tadiwanashe Marumani (8) failed to reach double figures.
Former skipper Craig Ervine scored 36 runs to emerge top scorer for Zimbabwe while Ryan Burl made an unbeaten 27.
Zimbabwe barely troubled Namibia’s run chase with the Chevrons managing just three wickets as the hosts reached their target with 5.2 overs to spare.
“I have just spent quite a bit of time in the change room with the team after that game and, when you ask what went wrong, as far as I am concerned, we got everything wrong,” Houghton lamented.
“We were awful today, embarrassingly bad. I think it’s probably one of the worst games that I have ever been associated with in a Zimbabwean jersey.
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“Why it happens, I have absolutely no idea. We train hard, we train with specifics. The guys worked really hard, they had enough energy coming into this game, but we batted poorly and followed that up by bowling poorly and our fielding was average.”
He remains optimistic that they will still qualify for the global showcase by winning the last five matches starting with Tanzania on Thursday afternoon.
“It’s a terrible start to this tournament, but we do know we’ve got to win the next five games and still qualify,” Houghton lamented after the loss to Namibia.
“That’s important for us, but not my best day and certainly not my happiest day. In fact, I feel like we should be all out here apologising to our fans.”
“When you are not playing particularly well and when you have lost a little bit of confidence as we have, we see demons in the wicket when we bat, but when we bowl there are no demons in the wicket,” he said.
“So, I looked at that wicket and it looked like a good batting strip and I would have thought we would score 170-180 comfortably.
“We gave a lot of wickets away, we were not batting positively, we were batting recklessly. I thought it was really a good batting wicket and they proved it when they chased.”
