A NEW START Zimbabwe Cricket - On murky waters waiting for the tides of change Tristan Holme Share Tweet

Sikandar Raza was among the stars to walk away as ZC's financial crisis mounted. ©Getty

March 22 was the day when, to borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson, Zimbabwe cricket reached 'the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back'. Shortly after 3pm, with Zimbabwe on track to chase down the UAE's target and qualify for the World Cup, Harare Sports Club was so full that the gates were shut. At a sleepy ground that has rarely reached half of its capacity over the last 15 years, it is fair to say that cricket had never been so alive in Zimbabwe. In the qualifiers in Bulawayo, queues outside Queens Sports Club had snaked around the neighbourhood as cricket fever caught hold.

The record crowds were only part of the story though. Four years ago, Graeme Cremer had given up cricket entirely, driven to the lonely pursuits of golf by frustration at Zimbabwe Cricket's maladministration. Now he was leading Zimbabwe's players in the tournament of their lives as they played out close, high-stakes games in front of vocal support.

Less than a year before, Brendan Taylor and Kyle Jarvis had been Kolpaked, Solomon Mire was designing shoes in Australia and Blessing Muzarabani was a rangy, unpolished 20-year-old without an appearance in domestic cricket. Now they were all featuring, with Taylor leading the tournament run charts. Sikandar Raza Butt was in the form of his life, while Sean Williams had overcome both personal issues and a broken finger to sneak into the squad at the last moment. Meanwhile Cremer's wife, Merna, was piloting the team's flights in between Harare and Bulawayo. In her spare time, she was broadcasting the tenser moments from a two-run win over Afghanistan and a tie with Scotland to an increasingly global audience, since the ICC would not spare the expense of televising the first round of games.

But as quickly as the tide had risen, so it would recede. When Zimbabwe lost a last-ball thriller by three runs, the mood deflated as quickly as the jumping castle behind the grass embankment. Back in the Zimbabwe dressing room, tears flowed into the night as the players lingered. "We didn't know what was going to happen in the future," Raza said recently. "So we just said, 'Gentlemen, if this is going to be our last moment in the changing room, I'm going to be here all night with you guys.' It might sound childish, but we just didn't know who was going to walk back into that changing room."

The uncertainty was real. Zimbabwe Cricket's financial state was so parlous that in the lead-up to the qualifiers, players were initially told that they would not receive their February salaries. Coach Heath Streak persuaded ZC to pay the national team in order to avert a damaging distraction, but franchise players went unpaid. Riddled with high-interest loans, ZC's hopes of a revival looked thin without evidence that their playing ability could match the financial contributions they were receiving from the world game. When the ZC board sacked Streak and every coach and selector in its employ in the week that followed, grief turned to anger - among the players and the public. Within a month, Faisal Hasnain had resigned as managing director. His tenure had lasted just one year in which Zimbabwe's fans had increasingly dared to dream. Now they were left to wonder: what could the future hold?

Cricket has never been more alive in Zimbabwe than it was on March 22, 2018 ©Getty

Six months down the line a lot more water has flowed under the bridge but the answer to that question is becoming clearer. If March 22 was the day that a memorable summer turned to autumn, and the absence of senior players during July's tours by Australia and Pakistan was the darkest point of winter, the first shoots of spring are now coming through.

At the same time that five players were sitting out the triangular Twenty20 series, ZC reached a significant turning point away from the field - one that was years in the making. On July 2, the ICC announced that its board had agreed a "package of measures to allow Zimbabwe Cricket to stabilise its business and allow cricket to flourish in the country".

Between 2009 and 2013, ZC took out extensive loans from local financial institutions. While the interest rates of 12 or 13 per cent were exorbitant enough, the terms of the loans meant that the rate doubled if repayments were missed - which they frequently were. Of the roughly USD 9m that ZC would receive from ICC distributions annually, as much as USD 3.5m would go towards paying interest in recent years. Cricket was handicapped as a result, with players going unpaid and domestic competitions enduring regular postponements.

When ZC broke the terms of a USD 6m loan from the ICC in 2012 - in a manner that suggested several ZC officials, including then-ZC chairman Peter Chingoka, were putting the interests of a creditor ahead of the cricket body - tensions grew. While a bailout package was compiled in 2014, it fell apart when ICC board members insisted that ZC would need to change its board and management, and Chingoka refused. While Chingoka resigned later that year, it was not until Tavengwa Mukuhlani was unexpectedly voted in as ZC's chairman in 2015 that a new discussion was initiated.

"Zimbabwe Cricket was literally on the point of being chucked out," says a source. "There were a number of influential ICC board members who felt that Zimbabwe Cricket has over the years wasted the money that the ICC has provided. Zimbabwe Cricket has achieved very little over the last 10 or 12 years. Their rankings were 10, 11 and 12 with all sorts of problems. The ICC board felt that giving USD 90-odd million to ZC over the next cycle would be throwing it down the drain." ***

There were other factors at play, including the fact that the ICC was falling short of its own expected income due to financial downturns. When Afghanistan and Ireland were granted full membership, legitimate questions were asked about why they would receive less than a quarter of the USD 94m that had been allocated to Zimbabwe. Other members did not want to be denied what they had been promised under the ICC's distribution model, and as solutions were sought, eyes increasingly wandered towards Zimbabwe's corner of the boardroom.

For the better part of a decade, ZC had escaped such glances simply by offering its vote on the ICC board to India. But with the ICC's governance moving away from simple factionalism towards something more meritocratic, the value of that vote was being diminished. Suddenly friends were harder to come by. "Other countries have something to offer; Zimbabwe had nothing to offer in return for assistance on the board. They did not have a good team, had no star players and they often get thrashed whenever other countries agree to fixtures," said the source. "They had very few cricketing reasons to stay in existence, and then whatever was given to them by the ICC was being drained by servicing debt."

ZC received between USD 70 and 80 million from the ICC over the last 10 years but have nothing to show for it. The organisation has no proper headquarters - it runs out of a residential property in a Harare suburb - and no formal academy. It does not own its cricket grounds. "So there was a real feeling that Zimbabwe needed to be sorted out, and step number one was downgrading it so that the ICC didn't have to hand over the remaining money that was due to ZC in this financial cycle," added the source.

Mukuhlani does not deny the tension, agreeing that the relationship between the ICC and ZC had broken down. "We needed to find a long-lasting financial solution to the legacy loans, the creditors, the recurring problem of non-payment of staff, non-payment of match fees to players, postponements of the domestic league," he tells Cricbuzz. "We needed to find a sustainable way of managing that and we couldn't do that without the ICC."

Employing Hasnain, who spent more than a decade as the ICC's chief financial officer, was a good first step towards getting ICC members onside. The World Cup qualifiers were expected to be awarded to Ireland when Hasnain joined ZC in April 2017, but in an emotional speech at his first ICC board meeting he spoke with conviction about why Zimbabwe needed the tournament most. While the country's hosting of the event was hampered by the fact that it was eventually given just five months to prepare - and was later criticised in an ICC report - the vast and enthusiastic crowds led to further thawing in relations.

"It gave a story to the world that, in the midst of all the problems, there is a cricket culture in Zimbabwe and there is a fan base in Zimbabwe. We can achieve something cricket-wise in Zimbabwe," says Mukuhlani. "That softened the stance from a lot of people, the ICC management and the ICC board."

Nevertheless, the ICC was not willing to solve the problem on its own. Last year, it gave ZC a list of conditions for providing assistance, which mainly involved securing assistance from the Zimbabwe government. ZC would need to convince the Zimbabwe Asset Management Company (ZAMCO), an entity established in 2014 to deal with the rising number of non-performing loans in the banking sector, to take over the loans from four banks at vastly reduced interest rates - as well as cut the USD 14m debt to banks by 30 per cent. Some of the banks who had been harvesting interest from cricket for years are understood to have been less than pleased by the idea.

Significant progress had been made by November, but when a military takeover brought Robert Mugabe's 27-year rule to an end and forced a change of government, ZC had to start all over again. It also had to convince the ICC not to take the qualifiers away from Zimbabwe. While the calm manner of the coup and swift transition of political power ensured that the tournament was retained, the task of getting the new government on side took time. "In February we were given an extension, which we didn't manage to fulfill within time. In April, if Zimbabwe had been on the agenda (at the ICC meeting), we would have been given a notice of suspension. That was not a threat, it was a reality," says Mukuhlani.

With the Zimbabwe government's focus on July elections, ZAMCO's buy-in was only secured at the 11th hour before the crucial ICC board meeting. But having adhered to the ICC's terms, a partnership was forged that will essentially see ZC's affairs overseen by an ICC-appointed administrator, whose salary will come out of ZC disbursements. It is an act of transparency that ZC have not always been willing to commit to.

Under this guidance, ZC have committed to paying off the ZAMCO loans, which have been cut to USD 10m, by 2020. The USD 3m that they still owe the ICC is expected to be repaid by 2023, allowing ZC to be debt-free when the ICC's next financial cycle begins. While the details still need to be signed off by the ICC board at its meeting in October, sources suggested this should be a formality given that chief executive Dave Richardson has overseen the process.

The new financial plan should also see ZC settle their debts to former employees such as Streak, who recently called on the High Court to liquidate ZC if the organisation could not pay the money that he and his backroom staff are demanding from ZC. While it will require a degree of austerity for Zimbabwe to claw their way back into positive financial territory, the fact that they will no longer be losing a significant sum in interest repayments should allow more money to become available for cricket.

Tavengwa Mukuhlani (r) will hope head coach Lalchand Rajput can provide long-term stability that Zimbabwe needs. ©

"What we now need to focus on is to make sure we are playing credible cricket," says Mukuhlani, and it remains to be seen whether his board can put a structure in place that will serve the country's players well. While recent accusations of financial mismanagement and corruption appear unfair given that his board appear to have found a sustainable solution to a long-running financial crisis, a more legitimate concern remains around the lack of cricket understanding.

"There is a tendency to run on emotion," says a source familiar with ZC's decision-making, and although Mukuhlani denies this, the track record suggests there is some truth. His board sacked Dav Whatmore as coach and Hamilton Masakadza as captain in the wake of the 2016 World Twenty20, just 10 months after they assumed office. Streak and Graeme Cremer were dismissed the day after the defeat to the UAE during a board meeting that had no formal agenda, while Tatenda Taibu was also asked to resign as selection convenor.

It meant that Zimbabwe had shuffled through four coaches, four captains, four selection convenors, four bowling coaches and five batting coaches in four years. "The main issue is that ZC looks to blame everyone else and never points the finger whilst looking into the mirror," an angry Whatmore said after his dismissal and the point still stands.

In truth the problem lies below the national team, which is something that Taibu was eager to point out when Mukuhlani convinced him to become involved in 2016. The former captain made the point emphatically with the Rising Stars, a youth academy that spent a summer touring England last year before it was incorporated into Zimbabwe's franchise structure. It duly won the 50-over competition, and five of its players - including Muzarabani - have gone on to make their debuts for Zimbabwe.

"I told (the board) that this is an indication our cricket is a shambles," says Taibu. "Of the matches we organised in the UK, four of them were against County second XIs and we won only one of those. The same team then came and played our one-day competition and won it. I said this is a great concern."

A bitter Taibu has refocused his energies on life in England. His knowledge and experience of the game is not a loss that Zimbabwe can afford, given that those those qualities are at a premium in the country. He says that Hasnain had been planning a new cricket structure, in which he was due to be the director of cricket.

Ironically, the Rising Stars appears to have created some of the friction between Taibu and the board. "The conversation had started around whether we would continue with the Rising Stars academy and a board member told me: 'We can't just chuck money for a group of boys to go and see the lights of London.' I pointed out the results that had come from the previous year, and the issue started there." The 2018 tour was cancelled in the wake of Taibu's departure, as ZC admitted they did not have the money to finance it, and the future of the academy is still to be decided.

However the good news going forward is that the ICC's partnership with ZC will extend beyond the financial realm, with ICC consultants making recommendations on cricket decisions. Their involvement should also ensure that the regular problem of salaries going unpaid is a thing of the past, which will allow the players to focus on cricket.

While there will be no World Cup to heighten motivation levels, the improved financial situation and the implementation of the ICC's new ODI league should allow Zimbabwe to host more limited overs tours. On the Test front, Zimbabwe could prove something of a gauge for the format's long-term viability. The cost of hosting five-day games is likely to prove prohibitive while ZC is clearing its debts, and the question will be whether there are good enough reasons to resume the format in four or five years' time.

By then, Zimbabwe's team will look very different. Taylor, Raza, Masakadza, Williams, Jarvis and Craig Ervine are all in their 30s, and mostly in their prime. New talent is coming through, but it has not always been nurtured - or retained, with Muzarabani the latest player to be lost overseas.

Zimbabwe's best and most consistent performances in the last five years came during their tour of Sri Lanka last year, when there was stability in the coaching department and regular game time. The hope is that the national team will become busier in the coming years, while it remains to be seen whether Lalchand Rajput, who has a reputation for being a journeyman coach, will provide the long-term stability that Zimbabwe's players need.

When Whatmore left he predicted that Zimbabwe would follow in the path of Kenya. The ICC has ensured that should not happen now. Having found a solution to its crippling financial problems, Zimbabwe cricket has an opportunity to slowly establish a more conducive environment for the game's regeneration. The tide is a long way out, but at least there is hope that it can roll in once more.

© Cricbuzz