Zim face nemesis as Aus head for Africa

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal"><script language="javascript">doweshowbellyad=0; </script><br />Australia are heading for a two Test, three one day international series to Zimbabwe with a team that is back to full strength now after the return of pacer Glenn McGrath from an injury that kept him out of the Test and ODI 2003-04 series against India. <br /></div> <div align="left" style="position:relative; left: -2"><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" align="left" border="1" width="33.3%"> <colgroup> <col width="100.0%" /> </colgroup> <tr valign="top"> <td width="100.0%" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="" valign:="" top="" background-color:="" f3f3f3=""> <div class="Normal"><img src="/photo/673536.cms" alt="/photo/673536.cms" border="0" /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Zimbabwean skipper Tatenda Taibu. (AP Photo)</span></div> </td> </tr> </table></div> <div class="Normal"><span style="" font-size:="" font-weight:="" bold="">But, the issue here is not that they are facing a cricket series there. What lies in store for them and the cricketing world is the total mismatch of the competition factor, perhaps in the annals of cricketing history. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="" font-weight:="" bold="">On its best day Zimbabwe have not been the best of teams facing up to better teams, and now that the Zimbabweans have to field an understrength team all those watching the matches will have to go through the experience of experiencing a massacre first-hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="" font-weight:="" bold="">In the recent Sri Lanka-Zimbabwe series the later were ground into the dust by Muralitharan and Chaminda Vaas, while the batsmen made merry adding to their personal statistics hugely.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="" font-weight:="" bold="">What needs to be examined here is as to why should, arguably, the best team on the planet have to face one of the worst. Are cricketing contracts so seamless that they cannot be broken, in order to give sanity a reign. With this backdrop in mind Indian skipper Sourav Ganguly has said he would prefer another league to be created for the minnows of the game, so that smaller teams reach the top-rate competition after they have attained a particular amount of skillsets. After all murder of a team on a pitch is not really a momentous or watchable matter.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="" font-weight:="" bold="">The Aussies themselves have said that they are going to Zimbabwe with a mindset that is usual - to defeat the opposition as comprehensively as possible. They have said that the tour would also serve to give the team from Down Under a kind of a seasoning camp before undergoing the rigours of facing other, more equal opposition, while it would also allow McGrath to get the rust out of his system from the prolonged sojourn that he was forced to take.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="" font-weight:="" bold="">For the rest of us the unfolding of events will surely be an exercise in evasion - turning the newspaper away from the sports page and tuning out the TV. Perhaps tours like these would be better off in not being held. The reason being that this will in no way promote cricket in Africa (no kid will follow or adopt a sport where the opposition or the home team is steamrolled), TV viewers will be turned off by the exhibition of needless destruction being wrought upon a hapless team, the Zimbabwean players will experience a catharsis that they will not recover from and most important of all the sponsors will question the need to put in their money into a losing venture.</span></div> </div>