Zimbabwe and the lost batting stars

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Zimbabwe's two greatest batters made their debuts on the same day. One made a ton and the other one half of that. But Zimbabwe only got to enjoy the peak of one of those players and never actually got a full career out of either of them.

Andy Flower made 59 from 201 deliveries, and that was certainly a prelude of what was to come. He would go on to score 12 centuries – the most ever by a Zimbabwean batter – and 27 more 50s in his 10 year career. He is undoubtedly one of the greatest batters we've ever had, with an average of over 50 in a very tough era, while coming in without many runs on the board.

The batter who made a hundred though was Dave Houghton. And his was a peek into what could have been. His best years were well and truly behind him by the time Zimbabwe got test status. He'd spent them serving as a policeman, tried to become a hockey player for a while, and played a lot of club cricket in the UK and Netherlands.

During this period, Zimbabwe had no first class cricket of their own. And the only serious competition Zimbabwean professionals got was when County sides would occasionally go there to play some games. And generally, only two of them would even travel every year.

Zimbabwe's status as an associate nation and the lack of competitive cricket led to an exodus of their best talent every year through the 1980s. Graeme Hick, Trevor Penney, Kevin Curran and Peter Rawson were all part of that trip out.

Rawson was probably the best pace bowler Zimbabwe had produced at that point. Penney was Zimbabwe's version of Jonty Rhodes. Curran was an all rounder, a little bit like his sons would turn out to be.

But Graeme Hick was something else. In the early 1980s, he was the most exciting batting talent on the planet. Cricket isn't like the NBA or football where fans obsess over young prospects. But most fans around the world who followed cricket at that point, knew of this young Zimbabwean who had managed to dominate, not one, not two, but three different first class competitions around the world. Hick's talent was what a lot of people were talking about, especially during the long wait he had to actually qualify to play for England. He was the most high profile loss of Zimbabwe.

Reports suggest they might have lost about 60 professional cricketers by the time they actually got Test status. And it was so bad that in early 1992, the Zimbabwe Cricket Board actually asked the players if they wanted to go and play international cricket or go back into the South African domestic system. The majority actually voted to go back and play in South Africa because they didn't see how they could compete as an international team.

This is Zimbabwe's story of international cricket. A young kid shows up with talent, word spreads, and soon that player is available on the open marketplace. Zimbabwe has some incredible batting talent, And like Hick, almost none of it ever dons the red shirt.

Colin de Grandhomme was the middle order dasher for New Zealand's incredible side. Gary Ballance had a confusing career for England and Yorkshire before playing a single match for his country of birth. And as Hicks struggled to fulfill the lofty projections of his early talent with England, Zimbabwe started their journey with an ageing Dave Houghton and Andy Flower. Houghton had already lost the start of his career, and due to politics, Flower would lose the end of his.

The reasons are all different. But when it comes to Zimbabwe, they find great batting talent, and then they lose it.

Tawanda Muyeye was born during Zimbabwe's most volatile decade. He was born in 2001, the same year when Robert Mugabe banned the BBC from Zimbabwe. Jonathan Moyo, Mugabe's Minister of Information and Publicity, banned international music and radio stations for instructed to play music aligned with the government. Then he released a barrage of jingles that helped the ruling party.

At this point, unemployment completely skyrocketed. Factories were shutting down and supermarket shelves were completely empty. And that's because food production was at an all time low as the chaotic land grab had happened. That brought the farming industry completely to its knees. Most Zimbabweans spent a significant part of their lives in queues for basic products like bread and milk.

This is also when the first two groups of the National Youth Service graduates were unchained onto the nation. They were the ruling party's militia, recently graduated from the Border Gezi training camps where they were upskilled in the art of violence under the guise of the National Youth Service training.

The Green Bombers, as they were known, were as ubiquitous as their namesake – the giant green flies that are prevalent in unsanitary conditions. When they were not controlling queues in supermarkets and small scale neighborhood shops run by private citizens, the Green Bombers unleashed a reign of terror on suspected opposition party members. They were part of a group that committed political killings, including 23 prominent members of the Opposition Party.

That was the Movement for Democratic Change, or the MDC. Mugabe and his party othered MDC supporters and politicians as sellouts or agents of the UK or the US. Between 2001 and 2009, hundreds of their supporters disappeared or were killed by political violence and a lot more than that were injured as well.

As the son of a successful accountant, Muyeye lived a life sheltered from all of that. His parents actively tried to shield him from that part of Zimbabwe and they exposed him to only the great things. When bread production ground to a stop in 2008, Muyeye's family just travelled to South Africa to buy a bread making machine.

He owned his first bat – an oversized GM – in 2006 when he was only five years old. Not because he was a prodigy, but because his brother had got a bat. If he hadn't received one himself, he would have cried for days. It was through his brother that he truly learned the game of cricket. Ensconced in the little bubble his parents had created, Muyeye was blissfully unaware that Zimbabwe no longer even had first-class cricket.

In 2004, they had agreed to suspend international cricket after a player exodus. In 2005, those who were left went on strike, protesting the implementation of Mugabe's henchmen into positions in the Zimbabwe Cricket Union. Things were so bad in one particular case, that Mashonaland province fielded a team of 11 players on debut. Only two of them averaged more than 10 with the bat, and their best had an average of 15.5. Their captain, a specialist batter, averaged 5.7, and he had never played beyond the weekend warrior level before assuming captaincy.

None of that had any impact on the young Muyeye. He ended up taking his cricket to Ruzawi, a private primary school that catered for children of the well-off just around the Marondera area, about 70 kilometers outside of Harare. It took him a couple of years before he even caught the attention of the coach, Julian Ndlovu. The youngster blossomed under his tutelage. The coach described a young Muyeye as someone who was confident, with a very strong work ethic.

However, despite their best efforts to shelter their children from Zimbabwe's trouble, Muyeye's parents couldn't do so indefinitely. His father, a reserved individual, was a regular at the now-defunct Book Café, a haven for free artistic expression and honest discussion about Zimbabwe's troubling situation. Being a patron of that establishment was enough to draw the attention of the ruling party. Let's just put it this way. It was a risky hobby.

His mother, on the other hand, was far more vocal and she played an active role in bringing about change. She was a member of the MDC and attended rallies and took part in anti-government protests. That got her onto a list that had one of three outcomes – imprisonment, hospitalisation or disappearance.

Instead of ending up like Itai Dzamara, an activist who was abducted and never heard from again, Muyeye's mother chose to disappear on her own. Not even her three children knew that she was leaving. One day, the trio arrived home from their holidays and they just found that she was gone.

Muyeye went through all the stages of grief. But he was stuck in the anger mode, because his mother's disappearance felt like a desertion. It didn't help matters that his father was deliberately vague about the reasons why she left. Rather than indefinitely fixate on events beyond his control, Muyeye immersed himself in sport.

Now a student at Peterhouse College, the alma mater of Tendai ‘Beast’ Mtawarira, the former South African rugby international. And for a while, Muyeye was a talented fly half in rugby himself, and he represented Zimbabwe at the under-16 level.

But when he was not on the rugby field, he was in the cricket nets. And any hopes of him ever playing rugby fell away when Muyeye decimated all the bowlers in his final year at Peterhouse College. He scored three centuries in six T20 innings at a national tournament, one of which was an almost inconceivable 161 against St. John's College, Harare.

That performance catapulted the teenager to national attention. He was soon selected for the 2017 Under-19 World Cup. Now that he was playing cricket so well and had seen a little bit of New Zealand and outside of Zimbabwe, he thought he could actually follow the path of his mother and sister and move to the UK.

Quite smartly, he realised that cricket was going to be his ticket out. He decided to create a portfolio for himself. He spent a significant part of his holidays at the Heritage High's Performance Centre recording videos of himself batting. According to his father, Muyeye's footage was accompanied by a list of his recent scores, essentially his cricket resume. Never one to shrink away from his failures, Muyeye also forwarded a comprehensive list that included all of his ducks and single-figure scores as well.

One of the places he applied was Eastbourne College, in the south of England. They responded almost immediately and positively. Suddenly, he was playing cricket at a posh school in England. And of course, life in England presented him with new challenges.

In Zimbabwe, his father had been wealthy enough for him to consider himself fairly comfortable. At Eastbourne, he was confronted with proper old school English wealth. And he's talked about it being very humbling. He was, for the first time in his life, poor by comparison. Of course, he still went to an elite school and had a scholarship, but he felt small compared to all the other people at that school.

Instead of dwelling too much on this new othering that he found himself in, Muyeye just threw himself into cricket. He had an incredible year, scoring 1112 runs at an average of 69. 5 at the institute. His runs earned him the 2020 Wisden School Cricketer of the Year award. At that stage, he was basically a young cricketer.

But there were things that had nagged at him quite a bit. For almost two years following his mother's departure for the UK, Muyeye's questions to his father about her reasons for leaving were met with continued vagueness.

Now, thousands of Zimbabwe professionals have left the country since the turn of the century. While hundreds of thousands have gone to either South Africa or Botswana, quite a few others have gone to Australia, England, different parts of Europe and other parts of the world that they could afford to go to. For a lot of those people, the migration was driven simply by either politics or just a need to survive.

Muyeye was persistent in his attempts to try and pry information from his father for almost two years. When he finally understood why his mother had left, it changed his view of the world forever. The sense of security that he had always enjoyed kind of disappeared, because now he understood that his mother's life was actually at risk. The bubble that he had been living in didn't really exist at all.

So since his arrival to the UK, Muyeye returned to Zimbabwe only once for a visit and he didn't really enjoy the stay because his mind was now preoccupied with security concerns and he kept looking over his shoulder to wonder if anyone was following. When he got back to the UK, he applied for asylum.

That decision meant that he made himself ineligible for selection to play for the country of his birth. As a cricketer, it meant that if he was going to play international cricket, it was going to take a lot longer than he originally thought.

At the moment, he is starting his career with Kent and the Oval Invincibles, but he's still more promise than he is runs. But I've seen a lot of his cricket on MV Play. And once you watch him, you realize there is a lot of talent there. Zimbabwe have definitely missed out on something. Being that they are desperate for batting, that's not ideal. Muyeye will qualify to play for England in 2027. He'll be 26 by then.

It's a sacrifice he is happy to make, but not because he hates Zimbabwe. In fact, he said before that it would be easier if he didn't love the country. His mum has mentioned that she is confused by his emotions for the country, being that their nation has brought them so much pain. But Muyeye still speaks Shona at home and his mum still cooks Sadza and makes an excellent Oxtail – all Zimbabwean recipes. His aunt sends over these mint sweets called Piccadilly. When he eats them, he can actually still pretend he's back in Zimbabwe.

Muyeye's story is not just about cricket. It is about a country that has been struggling for so long. He is a player who made this decision for so many reasons, but the issue is not really about him.

It's about the fact that talent has been found in Zimbabwe, and then it has gone somewhere else to shine on multiple occasions. Zimbabwe have lost batting to dictators, a lack of games, associate status, England, and simply a lack of money.

There is always a reason, but the result is always exactly the same. Zimbabwe finds batters, then they lose them.