Dirk Viljoen on the UCB Bowl final

On Saturday 5 February the Zimbabwe Board XI met Free State B in the final of the UCBSA Bowl competition at Harare Sports Club. The nerve of the home side's top order batsmen failed them, but thanks to a fine 51 by Dirk Viljoen they came close before eventually going down by 5 runs. Here Dirk talks to John Ward about the match, and also contributes some interesting ideas on future developments in cricket in Zimbabwe.

Match scores: Free State B 195/9 (45 overs); Zimbabwe Board XI 190 all out (43.1 overs). Full scores and match report LINKS

JW: Dirk, first of all could you review how the Board XI have done so far this season, please.

DV: We did have a good season, but our three-day cricket was a bit disappointing. I think the main reason was that other provinces knew we had international players in our side, and I think their game plan when they played us was to look for a draw. We had a good side, but we never got the results to prove it. But in a lot of the games we played, the other teams killed the game. They never gave us a target to chase, and unless we actually bowled them out there was no chance we could make a game of it.

There were a few games we could have lost; we did lose against Natal, and against Gauteng we were lucky to escape with a draw because we batted badly in the second innings. But in games against Border and Easterns, they didn't even make a game of it; they just killed the game. So we disappointed in the three-dayers, but we lacked a bit of discipline as well. We didn't bat too well in many of our games, maybe played a few too many shots too early, and no one got any big scores. I think in the whole season we only got two or three hundreds, compared to last year, when we won the league and got seven or eight hundreds.

In the one-day matches, I personally feel we were much too strong for most of the other sides; it's just a pity we played so badly against Free State. I still feel that we were the better side on paper; we had more experience than they did, and we should have beaten them. Fair dues to them - they played better on the day and they deserved to win. I don't feel we did ourselves justice.

JW: How has your personal form been for the Board XI this season?

DV: A bit disappointing. I got a 60 against Natal and then twenties and thirties; I got starts but didn't go through. I got a fifty against Northerns and a seventy against Gauteng. From a personal point of view I thought I should have scored more runs and done better. Looking at my performance last year, I had a really good season then. But it came together towards the end of the season: in my last three games for the B side I hit three fifties and two thirties. My technique wasn't quite right at the beginning of the season: I had a few problems, my feet weren't moving properly, and it took me a long time to sort it out. It showed, and because of that I wasn't selected for any games for the national side.

But it looks like it's coming back: in my last five innings, including club games, I've scored five fifties in a row now. Hopefully I can carry on this form to the end of the season, Logan Cup and whatever happens, if I get chosen for the national side. If I don't, I'll go overseas and play.

JW: And this match against Free State, when did you first hear who the opposition were going to be, and the venue?

DV: We had quite a good idea it was going to be here, as we had done really well and our run rate was high. If anybody else was going to be awarded a home match in preference to us, they would have had to have won all their games and also had a higher run rate.

We thought it was going to be Western Province, but about ten days before the game I got a phone call from the Zimbabwe Cricket Union and we were told it was Free State.

JW: What were preparations for the match like?

DV: I don't think our preparation was that great; the rain came at the wrong time. We had finished playing our season last year on 20 November, and we were then off until after Christmas, when we had one game against Northerns and after that nothing. We were practising a lot of field work, a lot of running, and the guys were fit. But I think we lacked match preparation. We had no match practice on good wickets; we practised on the Astroturf which is good practice, but not the same as a proper wicket. I'm not making excuses for our loss, but that could have been the reason for our not performing as well as we should.

JW: Were there any of the Free State team who before the match you knew that you had to watch out for?

DV: Yes, a couple of guys; a couple had been brought down from their A side --Morne van Wyk had played a couple of games for the first team; Jonathan Beukes had played well in the first team; Louis Wilkinson who hadn't played in their A side this season but has a huge amount of experience; van der Wath and Sokel Cilliers have been in and out of their A side. So these are the guys we knew about and we had game plans to curb their play, but obviously it didn't go according to plan.

We saw from the games against Sri Lanka and Australia that the wicket did a bit early on. Our game plan was to bowl first, keep them down to a low score and chase. We have such a long batting line-up that we backed ourselves to get any score they got. During the game we were a bit concerned; we felt they were scoring too many runs. We bowled them out for 195, but I think 170 or 180 would have been a better score for us on there, with a slow outfield.

It was a difficult wicket to play on, but when lunch came the guys were confident. We had been averaging 250 for the season when batting and I think the guys were prepared. We thought we could get the score. Maybe we were a bit too excited and we played a few too many shots first up, lost a few wickets and it was quite a struggle from there.

JW: At least in the Free State innings you never let a major partnership develop; you kept breaking through whenever one looked to be in the offing.

DV: That's right. But if you look at the scorecard, barring our top order, theirs was not that much different from ours. They had one guy who got fifty; we had one guy, and the rest of them scored around them. But we bowled maybe a few too many extras and we lacked that stability in the top order. If the first five batsmen had seen off the first fifteen or twenty overs, it would have been a walk in the park.

JW: Our top order looked very nervy out there.

DV: That's right. I take away nothing from the Free State bowlers; I thought they bowled immaculate line and length first up, and they knocked us over. They ripped a hole out of the top order, but like I said, when I got out there I didn't think it was overly threatening. If our top order had just consolidated a bit more, left a bit more, played time instead of looking at the scoreboard and in the last fifteen gone on a run chase. When we tried to do that, the problem was that we were already eight or nine wickets down. If we had two or three more wickets in hand, it would have been a different story.

JW: You looked in a different class from the others in the top order out there; they were jabbing and flashing, and you were the only one who seemed able to keep his head and play sensibly.

DV: I was more surprised, actually; I thought all our top order, from numbers one to seven, were all in good nick, had been scoring runs in the league and when we had net practices they were hitting the ball really well. Maybe a bit of over-confidence instead of going out there with a game plan, saying, "During the first fifteen overs I'm going to leave it if it's outside off stump and just hit the straight balls." It was seaming around a bit and maybe we just lacked a bit of adaptability.

JW: The confidence is just so fragile, though, for our team, anyway. The Aussies so often have somebody to pull them out of trouble, but if it hadn't been for you we would have been in a disastrous situation because the other top batsmen didn't seem to know what was going on.

DV: I think I put the loss down to application more than anything else. I think we didn't apply ourselves in the batting department.

JW: Anyway, things began to improve a bit when Craig Evans joined you, although even he didn't seem to be at his best for quite a while.

DV: It was going really well; he and I had just started hitting out again, we had just started picking up the run rate. It was the kind of wicket where, if you stayed in, it wasn't too hard to play on. But to get yourself in was very difficult. What happened was he got out and we had a new batter in, who had to play himself in again. Bryan [Strang] and I then started getting going, and I got out, and new batter again. That's how our whole innings went. We didn't have two batsmen who were well set who could just knock it around for long. We had too many wickets down already, and we had no wickets left at the end to sacrifice.

JW: When you went in to bat with four wickets down and only seven runs on the board, what was the atmosphere in the dressing room like then?

DV: It was quite difficult because I just felt like it wasn't happening. Sitting up here [on the balcony], I didn't even know where the team were - in the changing room, I think. It all happened so quickly, and by the time I got out and we needed 30 runs off the last 35 balls, the team was still in there, positive that we could still pull this off. Like I said, we had a big batting line-up and each one of us can bat, as you saw when last man David Mutendera came in and hit his first six balls for 12 runs. Until that last ball when Dave was run out, no one actually thought we would lose this game. All it took was a bit of consolidation in the middle, and one or two more wickets and we would have pulled it off.

JW: It's a big difference, though, between thinking 'we can do it' and 'I'm the guy who can go out and do it for us'.

DV: I think a bit of that as well. Maybe it's a problem that our batting line-up is too strong; maybe our top order felt, "If I don't get the runs, the guy behind me will get them," instead of someone going out there and saying, "This is embarrassing; I'm going to do this myself."

JW: It must have been really depressing after the match.

DV: It was, John; as I said to Trevor [Penney, the coach] after the game, "The worst thing about it is that no one even came close to beating us during the season during the one-day competition, and it would have been better losing a game earlier and winning the final." To have beaten everybody by such a big margin and then coming and losing the final . . .

But there are a lot of positives to take out of the season. I think maybe the negatives were that our batsmen didn't apply themselves the whole season; we should have got more hundreds. The guys were getting fifties and sixties but no one was getting a big score, like we did last year. And maybe our bowlers just lacked a bit of discipline.

Where we lost the three-day series was that our bowlers struggled to bowl teams out. We got into situations where we were 300 runs ahead of them but we couldn't bowl them out. Saying that, the two games we lost against Northerns and Natal, we lost them because we batted badly and they consolidated. But that just shows that they were good enough to bowl us out. Against sides like Border and Easterns, where we had big advantages with the bat, we couldn't bowl them out.

So hopefully next season we can sit down before the start - and I think that's the best way of doing it - and say, "Look, this is what we did last year; each guy go home, make a goal for yourself," and halfway through the season we revise those goals. I think that's the best way to make sure we have a successful season.

Looking at it, we shouldn't be losing to those sides. We're a national second team, with five or six national players, and they are just provincial league sides.

On the positive side, we've had young guys like Doug Marillier, Mark Vermeulen and Dion Ebrahim, who have come on in leaps and bounds. They've played their first season of Board cricket, and Doug's average were really good. It should do them a world of good, and I just hope they've learned from those games that no matter how well you've played, you're only as good as your next innings. I think they have, and hopefully next season we can go from strength to strength.

JW: Have you and Gus [Mackay, the captain] ever looked around at other players in the league and thought you would have liked to have had them in your side?

DV: I think that the side we had, the squad of 13 or 14, has been our best bunch of club cricketers. We've also been fortunate enough to have players from the national side coming down in the odd game. It's a bit hard on the club cricketers because it means they don't have a game, but at the moment apart from the young guys I've mentioned - and Greg Lamb, who's had a good season but underachieved a bit, I think - not many. Hopefully with the Academy, by next season it will be a different story and we'll be able to push those young guys.

I don't think the selectors have really missed anybody. A few people think, "Why aren't I playing?", but you look at them and say, "Show me your club record." Their club records have been bad; you can't say a 30 at club level, when the national side and the B side are away, is any good. I'm not knocking our national league, but it becomes a lot weaker, and if you can't score fifties and hundreds when the top players are away, you've got to look at yourself in the mirror and say, "I've got to be performing better to get into the B side."

JW: The same with the Logan Cup coming up: with the weaker standard of play, guys are really going to have to do something big for it to mean a great deal.

DV: That's right. But I think it's really good; I think it's going to work out well because if the national side was back and all twenty national players were playing, teams like the Academy, Manicaland and Midlands would not even compete. With the national side going away, it makes Mashonaland a lot weaker, which will bring it down to their level - not knocking Manicaland, Midlands of any of those teams. They haven't played that kind of cricket that the Mashonaland people have played, and I think the Logan Cup this year will be really good.

JW: Yes, excellent experience for guys who have hardly ever played three-day cricket before.

DV: Definitely. I personally feel that we're not playing enough of it. I would like to see in our set-up maybe two-day games. You can't say, with our academy now we have 22 or 24 professional players, that we can't organise two-day games on a Saturday and Sunday. There a lot of people who work who can get off on a Saturday and Sunday. We can play like the Aussies play, 100-over games. Saturday afternoon and the whole of Sunday. I think that can only strengthen our cricket.

JW: Yes; we have the Vigne Cup and the national league, so one could be kept as it is now and the other played over one and a half or two days, to keep a balance.

DV: Yes, I think we need to start doing it. I spoke to Paul Strang, who was on the Under-19 World Cup tour. From my experience, when I was under 19 I used to play club cricket, but when we played against England when they came out here a few years ago, we had a few guys who were playing club cricket, but that whole English side was playing country cricket. The problem we have here is that too many of our Under-19s are only playing club cricket. Now do we get that Under-19 side into the league as a squad, as a team, which will help with selection at a national level, as opposed to school cricket, which is a totally different level from internationals or the World Cup? They have just one week where they play three games, and a lot of them don't perform, because it's for selection. But if they were playing in the league, the selectors could say, "Hey, this guy's got talent." And they could pick a side from that, a squad to go to the World Cup, a squad to tour England. I think that's the best way to do it: you play your Under-19s in the national league, in the Vigne Cup.

JW: There's just the problem, though, that if matches are played over two days, a lot of them will have school commitments, and there are also exams.

DV: Yes, but at the moment our national league is just played on Sunday, and there's no reason why our national league side cannot play on Sunday. It would develop cricket in Zimbabwe because a lot more of the youngsters would be playing against better players, and they mature quickly because they're playing against older people, not just on the field but off the field. On top of that they are playing more cricket, they are being exposed to more theories on the game, as opposed to our school cricket now, which is just time cricket: you bat, and you play for a draw. And all the kids are being encouraged to play for their averages to get into the national side - which is rubbish. They need to play competitive cricket at a good level, which we're not getting at the moment.

They could play as their own team, and we have a coach for them. They go on tour but a tour is different. After a match they can sit down and talk about where they've gone wrong, and two days later they've forgotten all about it. After a tour, they come back and they don't see each other again. You can't develop cricket like that. They play as a club, and after each game they have a proper coach who tells them, "This is what we did wrong; this is what we did right." They practise on Tuesdays and Thursdays like any club does, and the next Sunday they play again, and they try to get better and better. This is how we can improve it.

JW: Coming from different centres, though, it wouldn't be possible to keep them together . . .

DV: That's right, but if that's the situation then there's no reason why you can't play Mashonaland Under-19s and Matabeleland Under-19s in the league. You play them on a provincial basis. Or if Matabeleland are so weak and don't have enough Under-19s, you make it an Under-24 side, and start drawing from the 22-year-olds, until you can make a big enough side to help those junior cricketers. When we played against England when they were here four years ago, when I played, they were a class above us. There were three of us who had played club cricket - I'm not even talking provincial cricket - and each one of them had played fully professional cricket for a county club for at least a year. Their experience and maturity was unbelievable in comparison.

Paul [Strang] spoke to me about this and asked me what I thought, and I told him, "I think it's a fantastic idea." He said they should play in the leagues; I said why don't you have an Under-19 side playing in the Logan Cup? This obviously isn't that easy because of time off school, but he said no, we play them in the club set-up on Sundays. I asked about if they had Sundays when they had to play school cricket, and he said that's why you make a squad of 15 so if guys go away you can fill in for them.

I hear cries from people saying, "My son's averaging 150 at schoolboy level," but you watch him play and he just sits on the handle for 50 overs. You can't have that in club cricket, in competitive cricket. You can play like that in a Test match, but he's not going to play like that in a club game. You have to learn to do both.

There's no reason why Under-13s, Under-15s and Under-19s cannot play in a provincial set-up like we play in the Logan Cup. For one month a year, at the weekends, they play in a provincial set-up of three-day cricket and one-day cricket. The same four provinces, without the academy, of course. There's no reason why those provinces can't select a senior side and all their junior sides. We have to start playing that sort of cricket, to develop our players earlier.

We're getting now players like Dion Ebrahim, who's playing his first three-day game - for the B side. We can't have that - it's the national second team, and he's never played the longer game before. Can you see anyone selected for South Africa A for a four-day game, and he's never played a four-day game before in his life? It doesn't happen, and that's the gap we've got in our country now. We've got to start playing more provincial cricket within those age-groups, so by the time they get to 19, or into the senior side, they know how to play the longer game. And all it takes is those fine adjustments which they'll learn from the older players.

I'm not saying that the Under-19 side that went to the World Cup wasn't the best side, or that they didn't do well, either; what I'm trying to say is that the Under-19 side might have been better prepared, more confident, having played more cricket at a higher level. There are a lot of those players who don't even play club cricket, and they go straight into a World Cup. My hat's off to them, though, for how they performed; they nearly beat England who, like I said, are full-time professionals. But there's no reason why, at that level, there's any difference between the two countries. We can set up something for those kids here, even if they have to take an afternoon off on a Friday to play a two-day game. There's no reason why they can't play Saturday and Sunday school cricket, two-day matches.

I don't think it's a money situation, either. We're talking development of cricket. If National Breweries can sponsor the national league and Ray-Ban can sponsor Old Georgians and OK Bazaars can sponsor Old Winstonians, I don't think it's that hard to find a sponsor for the Zimbabwe Under-19 provincial cricket set-up, or in the national league. There's no reason why someone can't go out and find a sponsor.

These are just my ideas from personal experience in coming through the Under-19 ranks and coming to the stage when, at 21, I went to Sharjah with the national side, and arriving there, I had played one first-class game. It's such a big step it's unbelievable, and we have to start bridging that gap.

JW: Coming to the Logan Cup this season, are you going to be playing for Mashonaland this season, or have you been posted elsewhere?

DV: No, I've been posted in Mashonaland and I probably will be playing for them. Hopefully I won't be here; I'm hopeful I might get on the national tours to West Indies and England, but obviously I'm not holding my breath. If I make it, I make it, which is a bonus, and if I don't I'll be here for the Logan Cup, playing for Mashonaland, and then venturing overseas to fulfil a contract in England.