Eddie Byrom and Nick Welch

He would have been good at anything he tried his hand at. His younger brother may end up being a better rugby player. Angus has had about 5 concussions, which is not good. I don’t think he can afford many more. He’s small for a centre and puts his body on the line big time, and you’re in the firing line at centre all the time. His dad was an Irish international as most know, but he was a fantastic batsman. In his last term at Falcon he scored 9 hundreds and 2 double hundreds! A record that will never be beaten until the end of time. He was the same era as Hick and I believe had a better record than him, he was a scratch golfer as well. He held a swimming record at Ruzawi that stood for for over 40 years and I think held a 100m record at Falcon that stood for a long time. An over achiever of some note 😂

Nowadays the schools perhaps play two 50 over games in the third term, they don’t really schedule any games in that term from what I can see, it’s a question of two schools agreeing to play because they have the weekend off. In the first term in January they only schedule about 6 games and then athletics nips the remainder in the bud. Half of those games get rained off.

The 5 or 6 main schools rely on two T20 festivals played in the August holidays and at the start of the third term to tick the cricket box. The cricket culture at school is all but done. If you’re scheduled to play a government school they invariably pitch up late or not at all, citing transport problems. The parents will not contribute one cent towards ensuring their boys get to a game, and they never ever come to watch, ever! It’s shameful. Those youngsters are on their own with zero support from day 1. You don’t get to play them at their own grounds because most don’t exist.

So if you’re a keen youngster you might get to play 6 or 7 games a year of 50 over cricket. There ain’t anybody good coming out a system like that. The black cricketers who’ve done well out of a township environment deserve some serious kudos because cricket really is a game that requires buy-in from parents.

If Masakadza wants to make an immediate difference he needs to meet with coaches and headmasters of schools and try and get more 50 over games scheduled. Our cricket has died at the roots and nobody has a genuine discussion about it, there are mere mutterings and shuffling of the feet. They need to identity the good kids and get them coming once or twice a week to practices at ZC facilities so they can get better coaching. There are very few decent coaches at school in the junior teams.

It’s all a huge mess that’s going to be almost impossible to sort out.

on a sad note, just saw on twitter that duncan frost is no more

https://twitter.com/ByoMetroCricket/sta ... 8283505668

As the Bulawayo cricketing family, we are really saddened by untimely passing on of

@QueensCricket Board Member, founder of the @SparBonsaT20 & former international umpire Duncan Frost. May his soul rest in peace

@ZimCricketv @ICC @CricketHarare @Vummim @madorotafadzwa

I see no commiserations for the Pink Rhodesian from anyone at ZC in an official capacity. He did more for Bulawayo cricket with no money than ZC have done with an annual 10 million dollar budget. At least he made them sweat a little before ICC strangled any possibility of a turnaround. Go well Frosty. If there’s an afterlife maybe you can come back and test deep rooted tribal superstition vs some recently purchased Christian beliefs.

I predict mysterious ailments afflicting some culprits.

You can only buy protective strong medicine with USD, bond notes won’t cut it, these N’angas only deal in greenbacks.

Should we rename this thread ‘political grievances’ ?

Why not, there’s no cricket to discuss. Don’t you have any?

Zimbabwe is dead

So you take over a farm and then decide to tourture and kill the animals? They don't realise you could eat the animals or sell them for money?

If you eat the dog that makes you like the new colonizers.

That is the one thing with the Chinese, they eat stuff that no one realized was actually edible 😂

The white guys look at what the black dudes eat and recoil in horror, and the black dudes do the same when they see what the Chinese are more than happy to get down their necks. Africa provides them with a hitherto unheard of smorgasbord of delights.

Real culinary stress must be felt by Gordon Ramsey’s wife when he’s about to chow down.

What happens is the ex farmer often gets a friendly call a few months later asking for help to fix the tractor or the combine harvester, or if he’s prepared to come back and possibly manage the place for a couple of grand a month, no jokes! Invariably the farm implements end up on auction though. The farm workers get displaced as well, some stay, but they know they’re not getting paid. They’ll go after the dispossessed farmer who has lost everything though, for their severance. The workers’ committees and the labour laws designed to protect their interests don’t work and seem mysteriously unenforceable when there’s a new guy at the helm.

This Command Agriculture is the biggest disaster this country has had perpetrated on it so far, and there have been hundreds. Aside from all the scams that happen in between, the farmer has to supply the crop to government at the designated laughable price to the local depot, at which point there’s now a new mysterious set price for onward movement What the smart connected guys were now doing was moving maize between depots and making some serious money. Aside from the sheer illegality of that, the depot managers were now having to falsely report that they had x amount in stock when in fact they had nothing, the result being that our food reserves were overstated tenfold. The politicians knew about it because they were in on it. 😂

Schemes are set up, not to resolve problems, but to create opportunities to take money.

The country has no electricity, therefore farming and industry is massively limited, never mind 18 hour power cuts in residences. We get electricity in the midnight hours because it’s supplied for free from Moz and SA we also import from those countries for industry, but they have their own problems and have customers that actually pay, yet we EXPORT electricity to Namibia!!

Kariba is not filling this coming season and next year the situation is going to be much worse. The latest scams are these solar farms that are supposedly being built. You just know that when they eventually come online the investors will not get paid for the electricity they produce. When they turn off supply watch what happens. It’s also supposed to be cheap electricity but the tariffs will actually go up because people are desperate.

The current tariff structures are an outrage. Firstly they’re selling us electricity that they get for free, where’s that money going?? Then the first few units are at a much lower rate, supposedly to help the poor, which it does, but for about 4 days a month, then the next tariff tier is double then triple that.

We have massive gas reserves in Zimbabwe, enough to solve most of our problems that are just not being developed because the people in power want such massive backhanders to rubber stamp the start-ups. When Gono was the Reserve Bank governor he wanted $100m to approve the one project in Lupane that would have been 4 times bigger than the Sasol project. He’s no longer there, but it means the next guy wants the same. I’ve got influential friends who own gas claims and the means to invest, but it’s not feasible whilst these avaricious and corrupt guys are at the helm. They’re not going anywhere either, the latest budget has Ministry of Defence at the top of the pile, they know people are fed up and they will squash any insurrection faster than you can blink. ZANU are also winning all the current by-elections by huge margins, even in MDC strongholds, and they’re actually getting the votes as well, people are too afraid not to vote for them.

Chamisa’s solution is for the nation to turn to Jesus, unfortunately Jesus seems to be a ZANU card holder 😂

This looming food crisis has the hierarchy positively salivating. We are going to require hundreds of thousands of tons of maize in the very near future and I will report the scams as they unfold. The tried and tested ones are to use food for political leverage, to repackage it and suddenly become a successful maize grower, which is a bit of a dilemma as it will be at Command price, but I’m sure they’ll realize the error of their ways and a world price window will miraculous open 😂

These donor agencies are all in on this, they’re a bunch of thieves as well.

Sometimes I think ZANU wants the poor to die off.

At least, if they become woke to ZANU.

Less Stray mouths to feed. Population control.

The world is largely that way. The rich mostly only care about their own lives. We would likely be the same if we were rich also. It is human nature unfortunately.

I recall Watermelon here bragging about how he was rich and literally would taunt and rub it in the poors faces to make them envious,jealous or powerful or something.

So not only do some of the rich not care, they are bragging about it as a power trip.

So do you accept Chamisa is a hand puppet? 😂

Sadly Coltart wastes as much time communing with God as do the ZANU lads. It should be clear to him by now which party Jesus supports 😂

They should spend some time watching Christopher Hitchens and they’d free up some time to actually be a useful opposition, they’re f^*#ing useless!!

If Hitchens was right then there's nothing wrong with all this thieving that you write about so frequently, Googly. These crooks are just surviving at the expense of those around them. If Jesus is right then the crooks count as crooks, just like we all know they do.

You missed the entire point of Hitchens. You don’t need religion to have morality and decency. In fact in this neck of the woods the thefts and amoral behavior gets excused en masse every Sunday, it’s a wonderful system. If you graphed church attendance and thievery in Zim statistically it would weigh in at around 99%.

Club games are being cancelled because there’s no money to prepare grounds because the rains are upon us, and long may they last. ZC are asking for fuel donations.

Of course if ea player puts in $1 you can get 20 liters and do it yourself, just a thought, or just sit under a tree and blame someone else.

Another drought will be blamed on illegal sanctions pushing the ITCZ north. 😂

The big crooks are not surviving at others’ expense, they’re thriving beyond their wildest expectations, there’s a big difference.

I’m trying to establish whether Ncube’s utterances about us entering the space program have any truth. It appears as if the government want to launch a satellite.

They want food aid, but they somehow have money to launch a satellite?

Our last budget a few months back was $28 billion and this one is $63 billion. How did our economy just double in size? 😂 Ncube is claiming it’s because the austerity measures are over 😂

This is a nightmare we’re living in.