So the champions trophy begins

[greg]

My bringing cricket down statement has nothing to do with politics.The current Zimbabwe side have just had to play off against the other 3 weakest (on rankings) teams and been thrashed in each game.What good does that do cricket to see one side getting thraped all the time even by the other allegedly poorer sides.Goodness knows how bad the games would have been had they ended up playing Australia,India or Pakistan.

As i have said if all the players returned i would have no problem with Zimbabwe playing top level international cricket but with the standard is currently so poor what good is it for all the other nations to have to take on the whipping boys?

Before you go on about recent records with Bangladesh i remind you that 5 of those games were in Zimbabwe and i also remind you that Bangladesh beat Australia last year ran them close in a test match and made Sri Lanka work extremely hard in their test series which shows the talent is there if given time and they haven't just pulled off one performance above what they normally do.

[Paoli]

It's not like we have a home crowd advantage greg. We get maximum 1000 people to a game.

Last year we also lost just 3-2 to Bangladesh in Bangladesh, another decent result. If the players defect in the future, then so it is. But I'm happy maintaining the status quo for now.

Ok- Zimbabwe notoriously take time to get adjusted to tournaments, normally about 3 or 4 games are needed. Case in point- VB Series 2003-04 where, by the end, we came close to beating India and Australia.

Zimbabwe have run many teams close in ODI's recently as well. Take some humble pie greg!!! There isn't much difference- if any- between Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.

[greg]

Originally Posted by Paoli

Take some humble pie greg!!! There isn't much difference- if any- between Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.

Why do i need humble pie?

Look at the results this last week.Which team performed creditably against Sri Lanka and which team won the match between the 2 sides (both got hammered by West Indies).To me that shows that Bangladesh have learnt from their previous games and are improving far more than Zimbabwe ever will.

[batoutofhell]

i do feel sory this zimbabwae (virtually under 21)side but some players who played during the ct were not even the school cricket standard players like rinke ,strydom,mufambisi are won't get into my street cricket team
unfortuanet incidents in zimbabwae brought this type of poor and pathetic players into the side
hope things will become better atleast in 2011 world cup
i also would like to see zimbabwae to play more matches against a-teams of the top 8 countries instead of teh big teams
even for bangaladesh i feel they need to play more competative cricket than what they are doing now like a-team matches)