ZIMBABWE women’s cricket team head coach Walter Chawaguta is not losing sleep over the prospect of facing Ireland after the same team broke the Lady Chevrons' hearts two years ago.
The Lady Chevrons went down by four runs against Ireland Women in that encounter under then head coach Gary Brent in Abu Dhabi. Zimbabwe are in Group B together with Ireland, Netherlands, Vanuatu and the UAE.
Zimbabwe and Ireland will clash in the penultimate match of the group on April 29 at the Zayed Cricket Stadium.
However, the experienced gaffer who is on his maiden ICC T20 World Cup Global Qualifier has chosen a more pragmatic approach: Controlling what he can and forgetting what is beyond his limits. He revealed this in an interview with Zimbabwe Cricket following a six-wicket loss against USA Women in their first warm up match on Sunday. The team play their second and final warm up encounter against Scotland today.
“It is something that you cannot avoid (thinking about playing Ireland). You are always going to sort of have that at the back of your mind, but it is one thing I am not talking about with the players. It is something that I think about as a coach obviously; but it is something that we cannot speak of as a team and in fact we are not even talking about the semifinals or anything like that,” said Chawaguta.
“We are taking each game as it comes, and we are focussed on the game. We get that out of the way, we plan for the next one. So right now we have just had a decent match against USA. We have got Scotland and that is where the focus is and once that is out of the way, then we focus on our next match.
“I think that I find it is easier to control things that are within your reach than to start getting too far ahead of yourself. The past is past, we made our mistakes and hopefully our players can learn from that once we start the tournament, we make sure that we do not drop a point, we make sure we do not drop a match and we make sure that we up for the challenge that lies ahead of us. Obviously, we want to be first in our group, that is target number one and target number two, we want to get ourselves into that semifinal then we can worry about what comes after that.”
On Sunday, vice-captain Josephine Nkomo and evergreen batter Chipo Mugeri-Tiripano top-scored with identical 38 runs each, chasing down USA Women’s 124-4, reaching 125/4 inside 19 overs. Lindokuhle Mabhera picked two wickets for 22 runs, while Nomvelo Sibanda took one for 11.
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“Obviously happy with where we are as a team, we still got some issues to work on. We have been talking to players about self-expression when they bat and it was good to see that it is starting to register, not quite to where we want it to be,” Chawaguta noted.
“The bowling was very good today, the change ups were good, the spinners bowled well, but still a few issues to sort out with our fielding. I think we are still letting too many balls through our legs and things like that. We are missing a lot of runout opportunities. We are creating them, so that’s a positive. The problem is we are not converting them. We are not getting the ball where it needs to be. So, those are some of the things and I think a lot of them very little to do with skill. It’s all about the mindset, but I’m generally happy with where we are,” he added.
Zimbabwe begin their campaign against Vanuatu at the Zayed Cricket Stadium, a night match on April 25. They take on United Arab Emirates in another night match at Tolerance Oval on April 27, Ireland on April 29, and wind off their group stage match against Netherlands on May 1, a day match.
The two finalists qualify for the T20 World Cup scheduled for Bangladesh.
