A Captain has Spoken

Hunter became the hunted like bush-meat

By: Callistus Davy

Feb.20 (Mirror Sports) - Forget the load of television pundits, leave aside the side-stepping rhetoric of coaches and the bunkum played out by captains and then bring in the unsung captain of the headsturning Zimbabwe cricket team that asked for nothing but gave something none may have asked for that has taken the sport to more people and places at the ongoing T20 World Cup. 

Sikandar Raza, the Pakistan-born, Scotlandeducated software engineer who is now a wholehearted Zimbabwean to the last letter and bone, exposed the punditry of present day electronic experts and coaches who continuously pour out the same old phrases into the mouths of gullible followers. 

While all captains, or most of them, prefer to cling on to the old book unmindful of living in a fast changing world where traditional cricket is becoming a dying act overtaken by T20 cricket, Raza made some striking remarks after beating the locally-adored Sri Lanka team under a grey evening sky. 

“If we are playing good cricket, then why does the toss have to play in our mindset”, said Raza when asked if he was comfortable batting second after Sri Lanka won the toss. 

Raza is no stranger to Sri Lanka cricket followers who until now saw him as a middle order batter fit only for the Zimbabwe team and a part-time bowler when the chips were down. The experts saw his team as merely making up the numbers in the 20-nation championship shoved into a five-team Group that was supposed to provide the punching bags for teams like Australia and Sri Lanka who according to the experts had already booked their places in the Super Eight final round even before the tournament could begin. 

But instead the hunter became the hunted as Australia and Sri Lanka were mere bush-meat to the Africans “I don’t think anybody gave us a chance to be where we are (in the Super Eight),” said Raza. He will go down in history as Zimbabwe’s most charismatic captain and cricketer who used inspiring words in the team’s dressing room to motive his players as he led from the front. 

“The way they (Sri Lanka) started they are 10 runs short and we should be able to win this”, Raza told his batters after his bowlers restricted the home team to 178. Raza leads not only a Zimbabwe team that has transformed itself from being the Davids among the Goliaths, but a country and a people who lost many a cricketer over domestic politics and faced the wrath of the International Cricket Council that banned them from international cricket. 

Zimbabwe is now a nation that has moved on setting the latest trends and encouraging all other upand-coming fringe teams that no longer can any one country possess players who are invincible. Come the Super Round and there’ll be no guarantee that the West Indies, India and South Africa will be able to have a walk in the park against Zimbabwe and a leader like Raza whose boyhood dream was to become an Air Force pilot growing up in Pakistan.

He found his feet playing club cricket in Scotland as a university student before flying the Zimbabwe flag at his first international match in 2013, ten years after his family migrated to the African nation. “Everybody loves an underdog story”, Raza said after outsmarting Sri Lanka to end as Group champions on Thursday. 

He has taken his team to new heights, and Zimbabwe will be one of the teams to be watched in the remainder of the World Cup matches. They may win, they may lose. But Zimbabwe is now no pushover and Raza at 39 has earned his stripes not in the skies or in corporate boardrooms, but out in the middle.