I think the native players are not very interested because probably the pay is not very good. But then again if the payment is not so good how can there be players in the team from another region?
Sikandar Raza is it, a Pakistani-born player. He wouldn’t have been on the team if the pay was not good. So, I think it’s something else. There must be players who really wish to be on the national team right?
I know that there are a lot of problems in the country and also on the board. I just think that they should arrange for more talent hunts in the country. That way they will be able to find actual talents which will be very helpful for them going into the future. And that will also make other kids interested in cricket in zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe do have a well structured domestic system and more than 90% of the players are native African. But the problem is that the quality is not very good. And that is why they are very dependent on players who are based outside such as Sean Williams. In case of Sikandar Raza, he was originally born in Sialkot, but migrated to Zimbabwe when he was 16 years old. His case is unlike the case with the UAE national team, which just imports players from India and Pakistan. Raza started his cricketing career in Zimbabwe.
Actually in my opinion the Zimbabwe cricket board is the one to blame. They had a really good team and they also had a good thing going on quite a long while ago. But because of the problems between the players and the cricket board the Zimbabwe team absolutely fell apart. And I think that is a big reason why the native people are not interested in cricket so much. But I have to agree that players are really hard-working in the Zimbabwe cricket team. They actually give their heart and soul to the game.
If we observe such players, we will see many of them, they go from one country to another and play games. But there are some players in particular whose playing standards are so good, they move from their country to another country. They became citizens of that country. But we will see if we observe them. So I think we will see a lot of players like Sikandar Raza here. Zimbabwe does not have many good players. For this reason their condition is not good at all. It would have been better if Zimbabwe had a few more good players.
Zimbabwe certainly does not have very good native players on the team. But I believe Zimbabwe found some good players, players like Christopher Mpofu, Who was actually very good. But they got lost in time. I really don’t know what happened to him. He showed some good performance early on. I remember him playing against Bangladesh and running through the batting lineup of the Bangladesh team. In my opinion, it is a problem of proper nurturing of the players.