Published: Feb 18, 2015, 10:15 AM (IST)
Edited: Mar 09, 2015, 11:12 AM (IST)
Zimbabwe Elton Chigumbura talks about his team’s game against UAE. Zimbabwe play their second game of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015. After a good showing against South Africa, Elton Chigumbura and team will be hoping to win against UAE. ICC Cricket World Cup 2015: Full Coverage.
Q: What are your preparations like for the game against UAE?
Elton Chigumbara (EC): The preparation has been going good. Playing the first game gave us the opportunity to try and correct where we went wrong from the first one. The two days that we’ve got, we tried to polish that, and yeah, we’re now looking forward to the UAE game.
Q: Was it a sense of frustration at the end of the match against South Africa, or was it a confidence boost?
EC: It was a bit of both, a confidence boost the way we played, and also it’s always disappointing to play the way we did 90 overs, and we didn’t manage to finish off the last 10 overs. But we took a lot out of the game that we played, and hopefully we can carry on with that form.
Q: You haven’t seen much of the UAE. You guys have never played against each other in ODIs. What do you know about the team, and what are you expecting tomorrow from them?
EC: Every team that we’re going to play, we have to respect them and play the cricket that we are capable of playing, and hopefully the good thing about cricket, a good boy is a good boy, so we just have to try and do the basics right, and obviously there’s one or two guys that we know, so when I have to go back to basics because my judge of the players, we don’t know. At the end of the day, we just want to play good cricket.
Q: Was the Ireland‑West Indies match just a reminder that sometimes the associate teams can bring a surprise?
EC: Yeah, it is. Every team that is here is capable of winning games, so at the end of the day, we have to take every game seriously and do the basics right and make sure that when you get into good winning position you are ruthless and win the game.
Q: And Hamilton is in great form, 100 in the warm‑up game and 80 against South Africa. How much important is that for the Zimbabwe side, such a key player?
EC: Yeah, it is. He’s leading from the front. He’s a senior batter on the team, and it’s rubbing off to the rest of the players. The good thing about our team at the moment, everyone is in good nick, so we don’t expect just Hamilton to put up a good performance. The rest of the guys in the squad are capable of doing the same job. Yeah, we’re looking forward to this next game, and it’s good that we have played our first game, and the results obviously didn’t go our way, but there’s lots of positives that we can take from that, the first game we played.
Q: You have seen the ground over here, and considering how small it is, are you planning any change in your combination? Are you planning to have an extra batsman or anything of that sort?
EC: No, we just have to make sure that we improve on things that we didn’t do from the first game. I think that’s the most important thing when it comes to our team because our team is quite balanced when it comes to batting and bowling. Just polishing up where we went wrong in the first game.
Q: A lot of the games in this tournament have been very high scoring, 300 plus very often. Does that make it easier or harder for the side?
EC: I think because of the grounds are smaller, so obviously it’s going to be a high‑scoring game. It’s just a matter of staying in the game longer, and that way, whether you’re setting or you’re chasing, you have a better chance of scoring those big scores.
Q: What have you guys done after the adversities against Bangladesh? What has made this turnaround as we saw in the match against South Africa?
EC: For us, obviously in Bangladesh it wasn’t good. We tried to put that aside and focus on what is happening now, and also the conditions here. They’re very different from Bangladesh. They are good wickets here. They don’t turn much. Our focus since we came here, we have been playing good cricket, so we just need to carry on the way we are doing and try and forget about the negative that happened in Bangladesh.
Courtesy: ICC
