Nigeria U19 team wanted some practice before their qualifiers appearance and ZC obliged - and Nigeria are thankful for that. I don't think we need to look at this from the "Oh we are now only good enough to play Nigeria" angle...
It doesn't help Nigeria if they are bowled out for 28 in 7.3 overs. Neither does it help develop Zimbabwean youngsters who will likey be the core in trying to qualify for they 2023 WC if they play an hour of ODI cricket. Nigeria are better suited and will be better off developing against other associates until they can eventually qualify for the WC. Nepal & Afghanistan went that route and they excelled in the recent U19 WC. Don't start blaming players failing to deal with pressure situations in key WC qualifier games. You decided to fine tune against Nigeria
But we need games against other u19 sides. These boys have played a couple of club sides and a couple of franchise sides and there are some decent players in there. I know a few of them. ZC is letting them down with no game time as usual. Other sides have played multiple games already against decent opposition. We can’t still have a squad of 30 either, surely they should have a squad of 15 by now? I will guarantee that there’s a couple of overseas boys that have not committed, the main one being Muyeye. There’s a young Hilton boy, Booth, who should also be in the mix. He’s probably the leading schoolboy fast bowler in SA. I think they were holding out for an SA call-up, but I don’t think it will happen. It’s probably the quota issue, but he also has a very marginal action. There’s also a young black kid, left arm seamer in SA, who is apparently damned good as well. I was told to go and look at Sean Bell’s tweet! No holding back there 😂
But he’s right, we should have our squad and we should be playing decent opposition. We’re not giving ourselves a chance.
Muyeye has had games for Sussex Two’s, and done well. He’s at the next level. England and India will field teams with youngsters who’ve played a high standard of County FC and List A cricket, and are contracted professional cricketers. The England u19 captain may well be a kid called Jamie Smith, this season for Surrey he’ll get game time in a team of very serious cricketers
The problem is they’re going into Southern Hemisphere winter soon so ideally they’d need to be touring north, which isn’t going to happen. Also quite a few boys are writing exams in Oct when cricket starts up again, so if you have schoolboys they’re not that well placed. This u19 WC is mostly aimed at guys who are their first year out of school.
In the second game Nigeria were 40/1 and ended 111 all out, so this game is nearly over. They clearly can’t play leg spin.
Whilst we’re doing Nigeria a favour, some other sides should be doing us the favour because we’re not taking much from this. They need to at least agree that we bat first.