Posted by Australia were whitewashed in Pakistan going into this tournament and earlier in the week lost their captain to internal testicular bleeding. Defeat to Zimbabwe could therefore plausibly still rank as being ‘on the up’.
Today’s result moves Australia’s T20 World Cup record against Zimbabwe along to ‘played two, lost two’. In the previous match, in 2007, they were bowled out for 138, so 146 all out again smacks of progress.
Throw in the fact that the team back then featured both Matthew Hayden AND Brad Haddin and it’s hard to argue that great strides aren’t being made here.
If you’re wondering how Cricket Australia’s official website reported on the result, they’ve gone with the obvious headline of “Boilover!“
The main body of the article reports that, “Zimbabwe have edged Australia in a stunning T20 World Cup boilover in Colombo.”
Australian sporting slang is a source of endless joy for us. We’ve been reading Australian sports reporting for about 20 years now and we can’t recall a previous ‘boilover’. We’ve no idea how it’s passed us by, but we feel huge confidence that we’ll now encounter it roughly once a week until the day we die.
For what it’s worth, we regularly suffer boilovers ourself as when we leave a pan simmering with the lid ajar, it always seems to jiggle its way back into position, at which point the internal heat rises and the pan boils over. As far as we can tell, there are a great many online ‘hacks’ to prevent a pan boiling over, but pretty much all of them seem to involve not using the lid in the first place.
Australia have greatly minimised the number of Zimbabwe boilovers they can suffer through the simple tactic of largely avoiding ever playing them. Perhaps we can all learn from that. Maybe we should do without a pan lid.
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‘How will Australia ever break Zimbabwe’s hold over them in T20?’ will be the talk of the cricketing world for years to come. At least of we try hard enough.
Pleasingly, Wellington Masakadza, who took a wicket in yesterday’s match, is the younger brother of Hamilton Masakadza, who took a wicket in that 2007 match. In both matches they went for exactly 9 runs an over – clearly a family tradition.
We have to say, after apparently cracking the Masakadza family’s naming system just now, we were very excited to click on “SW Masakadza” to see what they’d gone for. We were therefore rather disappointed to learn it was Shingirai, despite the fact that taken in isolation it’s an absolutely top drawer name.
I feel like the poster child for the “if something goes wrong, never attempt anything like it ever again” approach to life so this feels comforting.