After Zimbabwe succumbed to a 117-run defeat against West Indies in the 1st Test at Bulawayo, coach Heath Streak rued the lack of Test matches that his side gets to face. Stating that the long gaps between series have hampered the progress of his side's application with the bat, Streak went on to say that hopefully this pattern will change. "For us to get over the 300-mark chasing more than 400, there are not many times that teams have done that. So it was good for us to know that if we have to do that in the next match, were capable of getting a 300-plus score batting last."
"If we reflect on this innings, there were two or three very soft dismissals \u2013 Graeme and Sikandar, maybe even (Regis) Chakabva were soft \u2013 and then two unnecessary run-outs in a Test match. So actually they only got five wickets properly and then weve gifted them half of our wickets. It's something weve spoken about, that we need to make them earn those wickets a little bit more.", he added.
"They would have been very strong opposition, but that didn't materialize and it set us back a little bit," said Streak. "We had our own Logan Cup games but the level of that is not quite the same. For guys to change over having not played (Tests) for such a long period of time I've said for a while that I think Zimbabwe play well when we play consistently and regularly at elite level. Hopefully in the future we will have fewer long gaps in between series and guys can play regularly at that high level.", he went on to say.
"Originally we had asked West Indies to play ODIs because our focus is very much on the World Cup qualifiers that were hosting and we want to make sure we get into the 2019 World Cup. So short-format cricket is a strong focus that were going to have over the next six months, but we have some (Test) series lined up against South Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan want to play us, so weve got a good bank of cricket coming up next year, which will be good for the guys to play regularly.", he concluded.
