Trevor Penney: Zimbabwe Board XI v Easterns B

Zimbabwean-born Warwickshire cricketer Trevor Penney talks to John Ward about his role in Zimbabwean cricket, and also about the recent three-day match between the Zimbabwe Board XI and Easterns in the UCB Bowl Competition.

Graeme Hick is a Zimbabwean England-qualified player who seems to have abandoned his roots, but Trevor Penney has never done so. Every English winter he returns to Zimbabwe, generally with plenty of much valued cricket kit, to play, coach and do all he can to promote cricket in the land of his birth.

He is the current captain of Old Hararians Sports Club, the `old boys' club of Prince Edward Boys High School in Harare, which he once attended. A couple of weeks ago he scored a fine century for the club against Universals, along with Dirk Viljoen, the pair pulling the team out of a difficult position and taking them through to an eventual convincing victory. It was actually his first match since an eye operation two months ago, but it was marred by his cracking a finger.

He was appointed player-coach of the Board XI under contact to the Zimbabwe Cricket Union but, with four matches gone out of the programme of six, he has so far been unable to play at all. Besides, he is not sure that the selectors really want him to play in these matches, as his presence would deny a promising young Zimbabwe-qualified cricketer a place. The final two matches will be played in February, and he will have his squad practising once a week until then. Whether he will then play himself remains to be seen.

The Logan Cup also starts in February, but fixtures have been arranged so as not to clash with the Bowl matches. He is to coach and probably captain the Mashonaland A side. It is his fourth year in this sort of role, and he confesses that he really enjoys it, and each year gets better and better because his teams, whatever they are, wins about 80% of their games.

Things are becoming rather more complicated for him in that his daughter Samantha is now of school-going age and will have to spend half the year at school in Zimbabwe and half in England. "I've got a three-year contract in England now," Trevor says, "which includes my benefit year in 2003; after that it depends how things are with my county cricket. If I'm still enjoying it I might carry on, otherwise hopefully everything here will have sorted itself out and we'll come back."

Trevor has naturally taken a keen interest in Zimbabwe's progress in India. "I think in the First Test they played very good cricket," he says. "It was nice to see a positive declaration; we could have just batted out that night and it would have been a definite draw, but we thought maybe we could win this game. It backfired because in the second innings we didn't bat very well, a couple of dodgy decisions with Andy [Flower] and Olonga, but that's cricket. We competed, hey! We choose from a hundred cricketers, they choose from a million, so to compete like that is very good." Notice the use of `we'.

"That is one of the flattest pitches ever," he comments regarding the Nagpur Test. "But we just need a good start - we don't need to lose a few because normally we don't bat all that well then - and we'll get a big score batting second."

Coaching the Board XI, Trevor finds the area requiring the most concentration is simply developing the right mentality for the longer game. "We don't play enough three-day cricket," he says firmly. "In our one-day cricket I think we've lost three games in four years out of about 28 so far - which is phenomenal. We just don't play enough threeor four-day cricket. It's all very well telling them how to change their game, but if we don't actually play enough it won't work. These guys play three or four three-day games a year, if they're not playing Test matches.

"So I'd like to play a bit more, and I'd also like this to be four-day cricket, not three-day cricket. You learn a lot more: you learn how to bat for longer periods, but in three-day cricket you end up declaring on 300 and you don't learn how to get big scores. Our batting is normally a bit stronger than our bowling - I don't know why, but perhaps it's the flat pitches we produce in this country, where bowlers end up getting punished a bit and don't bowl as well as they should." Or perhaps so much one-day cricket at club level and elsewhere has meant that bowlers just haven't learned how to get batsmen out. "You bowl ten overs in a league match, but you're not really achieving anything for the long game, are you? You're just trying to tie it up, not take wickets."

Trevor also agreed with my suggestion that the main reason why three-day rather than four-day cricket is played in the Bowl is that most of the South Africans at this level are amateurs who have to take time off from their regular jobs to play, which is often difficult. "We've come on in leaps and bounds, and most of our players are professional now," he says. "Gus Mackay and Craig Evans are the only two who aren't professionals. That's very nice because you can practise whenever you want, and as much practice as you need. The guys are getting better, and putting a lot of pressure on the main side when the guys are doing as well as this all the time. Raymond Price especially has done really well. It's my aim to get as many of these guys as possible in nick so they can push the top guys."

The Board XI were playing under their third captain (Gus Mackay) in four games, the previous incumbents, Gavin Rennie and Dirk Viljoen, having been called up to India one after the other. But Trevor does not feel it has affected the side too much. "Luckily we've got such a good team spirit that we just seem to get on with it," he says. "Our first captain Gav Rennie was really good and we won both games, just like we've done here. Dirk had a harder job - travelling away to South Africa is always different - but we still did very well: we won the two one-dayers and drew and lost the three-dayers. I'd prefer it if I was captain throughout and able to deal with things on the field as they happen. But we still do well without that."

Before this match the Zimbabweans knew very little about the opposition. They played them and beat them last season, but the Easterns team has changed so much in that time, with many of the former side promoted to the seniors and four or five out-of-form seniors demoted to this match, that most of the present team are newcomers to the Zimbabweans. "That's why it was surprising that in the three-day game they folded for 62 in the second innings; they have some good players," Trevor says.

Easterns batted on winning the toss in that match, which was something of a relief to the Zimbabweans who were uncertain of what to do had they won. They had a good start so Trevor was pleased to see his team restrict them to 248. "There was a long outfield so it was probably worth 300. We kept losing wickets at intervals so we only got a lead of about 25, which we thought might just help a little, but they just committed suicide, really - played big shots, caught cover, caught gully - it was one of those days when everything just went for us. We needed 37 to win and made them easily with one down."

Left-arm spinner Ray Price, with ten wickets for just over ten each in the game in about 50 overs, was the definite Man of the Match, according to Trevor. Not far behind was Dion Ebrahim, who followed up his century against Natal B with another here, after some failures down south. "Everyone got in and then got out," he says of the other batsmen. "Craig Evans played a good innings of 51 at almost a run a ball and played very well. Craig Wishart got 20-odd; Trevor Gripper must have got 15 or 20 - he struggled a bit, hitting the ball very well but just going through one of those patches when he gets out in different ways all the time. It was a good performance - everyone chipped in around Dion.

"Of the bowlers, Gus and Pommie [Mbangwa] bowled very well and so did Douglas Hondo. Craig Evans bowled a couple of overs in each innings and each time he got a wicket, a breakthrough that we needed. So everyone made contributions and it was a good team performance.

"The fielding was general good, but it's quite a tacky outfield so I don't expect much blinding fielding on these fields. It was just an average performance, and Wishart took a lot of slip catches.

"Today [in the one-day game] the seamers bowled so well up front and tied them up so tight that it was big shot and out. Before they knew it they were five down, all their good batsmen out. They managed to get to 142 and we were cruising towards it at 92 for three. Then we had a dose of over-confidence, definitely, but just made it by two wickets."