Zimpapers Logo

JUST a week after their participation in the Triangular One-Day International series in Harare that featured Australia and South Africa, the Zimbabwe cricketers are back in camp preparing for their longest foreign tour in a decade.Zimbabwe will take on Bangladesh, in their backyard, in what should be a thrilling basement battle.

The Zimbabwe squad in camp is the same group that trained for the Triangular ODI series, minus the players who are currently in Bangladesh with the Zimbabwe A side.

The players are having two sessions of training daily, with fitness tests in the morning and skills, nets and fielding practice in the afternoon.

The sessions are being held at Harare Sports Club.

The twice-daily sessions will continue until Friday, when the players will break camp for the weekend then resume again on Monday until Friday next week.

After that, the sessions will be scaled down to just morning sessions before raising the intensity again with a spin camp that will have two sessions daily.

The squad plans to travel to Chiredzi for a four-day match from October 11-14.

They will then rest for a day before departing for Bangladesh on the 16th of October. The tour of Bangladesh will be Zimbabwe’s longest in more than a decade, as it has three Test matches and five ODIs. Since the country’s phased return to Test cricket after deliberately suspending fulfilling those commitments to give their side enough experience in the longest version of the game, Zimbabwe has been playing one-off Test matches.

Their away tours have also had a maximum of three ODIs.

There has been an increase in activity for the local cricketers since prominent lawyer, Wilson Manase, took over as Zimbabwe Cricket boss.

This has been slap in the face of the prophets of doom who had been using the lack of cricket as their weapon to prop up their endless boardroom battle against the ZC leadership.

Such is their determination, to knock out the ZC leadership, that some of them even mourned, using the Facebook page of a prominent critic of the cricket leadership, when Zimbabwe shocked Australia in an ODI game during the triangular.

Brendan Taylor will captain the Test team while Elton Chigumbura will be in charge of the limited overs team in Bangladesh.
Zimbabwe to Bangladesh 2014 Itinerary

Three-day game in Fatullah,20 to 22 October
First Test match in Dhaka,25 to 29 October
SecondTest match in Khulna, 3 to 7November
Third Test match in Chittagong, 12 to 16November
One-day practice match in Chittagong, 19November
First ODI in Chittagong, 21November
Second ODI in Chittagong, 23November
Third ODI in Mirpur, 26November
Fourth ODI in Mirpur, 28November, and
Fifth ODI in Mirpur, 1 December — Sports Reporter/Zim Cricket.