There is something just a little bittersweet about Gary Ballance's success. The century he scored last weekend has taken him a step closer to making the England team, building on the good impression he made playing for the Lions in Australia last winter, when he scored three fifties in six innings. Sometime soon, it seems, Ballance will win his first full cap. But it won't be for the country where he was born and who he played for when he was a teenager, Zimbabwe.
England, so adept at tracking talent, will have spotted Ballance back in 2006, when he made 47 and took three for 21 against their own U19 team. Back then he was playing against a couple of the players he is now alongside in the Lions, like Moeen Ali and Varun Chopra. Later that same year, he won a sports scholarship at Harrow. His parents ran a tobacco plantation back in Zimbabwe, but were forced off their land during the farm invasions. They've since resettled in Harare. But he stayed on. He took up a place at Derbyshire, where his uncle Dave Houghton, was head coach, and then joined the Yorkshire academy. He has qualified to play for England, but has been back in Zimbabwe most winters, playing in the Logan Cup.
Ballance is anything but unusual in that. Countless cricketers have made similar switches. The difference is that Zimbabwe, unlike other Test sides, cannot afford the loss, though they've long since had to reconcile themselves to it. In fact, they can't afford much of anything at the moment. Last year Zimbabwe Cricket announced that it had a $15m debt. That despite the $1.5m they were awarded by the ICC as part of the Targeted Assistance and Performance program. Shortly afterwards, the Board themselves were evicted from their offices at Harare Sports Club because they had been missing rent payments. During their recent series against India, the players travelled by bus from Harare to Bulawayo, while the Indians went by plane. When he Zimbabweans finally got there, ZC couldn't afford to pay for the team to eat in their hotel, so the players had to commute to the ground and back just to eat their meals at a cheaper venue.
India's five-match tour is said to have brought in around $8m from ZC's share of the TV revenue. ZC President Peter Chingoka described that money as "basically a drop in the ocean because of all these other problems". Zimbabwe make a loss on almost every other tour that comes their way, and will do again during their current series against Pakistan. England, one of the few teams who could help the Board turn a profit, haven't got a tour scheduled at any time in the next seven years. The knock-on effect is that the BCCI can rely on the unwavering support of ZC in negotiations at the ICC. More immediately, it means that if it weren't for the support offered by the BCCI, cricket in Zimbabwe would be dead already, rather than seriously ill.
The players themselves recently had to go on strike, something they had already threatened to do earlier this year, in protest against the money they were being offered for the off-season. The initial contracts were for $100 a week plus $2 a day for bus fare. The Logan Cup itself has been cut from 12 matches a season to eight, and the second XI competition was scrapped altogether. In the circumstances then, it's no surprise that many of the players who can get out are quick to do so.
Ballance, the best young batsman in Zimbabwe, is long gone. And he has just been joined by Kyle Jarvis, the best young fast bowler. Jarvis, 24, has taken 30 wickets at an average of 32 in eight Tests. He won't add to them for a while. Instead, he says, he wants to "pursue a county and global T20 career", and he has signed a three-year deal with Lancashire. Like a lot of players, he has had to choose between the security of a county contract, and the chance to play for his country. Cricket Australia have just changed their eligibility rules to allow Sam Robson and a few others who have dual passports to play in Shield Cricket without compromising their status in county cricket.
The reaction in Zimbabwe to Jarvis' decision has been sad but sympathetic. Heath Streak rightly said that "you can't blame some of these players on the decisions they make; you better ask the question 'why?' The way these guys have been treated is like they are not professionals." Sean Ervine dropped out of the Zimbabwean team so he could concentrate on playing for Hampshire before the last World Cup. At the start of this season his brother Craig, who was the team's leading run-scorer on their recent tour to the West Indies, turned down one of those derisory winter contracts so he could go and play club cricket for Lymington in the Southern League. "In life," he said at the time, "tough choices have to be made and this is one of them." Both the Ervine brothers would like to play for Zimbabwe, but they simply can't afford to.
Zimbabwe aren't the only team wrestling with these problems. Ireland have suffered the twin blow of losing their best batsman, Eoin Morgan, and best bowler, Boyd Rankin, not just to county careers, but to the England team. At the start of the season Alexei Kervezee, the best young batsman in the Netherlands, announced that he was giving up playing for the Netherlands so he could concentrate on his career at Worcestershire. The counties accommodate England's demands on their players, but they've no incentive to do the same for other nations. So the small teams lose their best players, and get no recompense for it other than the pride of seeing them succeed in another team's colours.
The three teams are all in different situations. The Netherlands have no chance of playing Test cricket, whereas Ireland would like to and Zimbabwe already do. So this rash of retirements and defections aren't just evidence of the game's struggle to grow in new countries, but of its failure to sustain itself in an area where it was already well established. In 1999 Zimbabwe reached the Super Six stages of the World Cup with a team including Grant and Andy Flower, Murray Goodwin, Neil Johnson, and Streak. Their seam of talent is still rich, but it's not running towards their national team anymore. It will be a long time till they reach those kinds of heights again, if they ever do at all.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"I guess it got to the point where I didn't want to be the person that sits in the cafe saying: 'Oh jeez I wish I'd done this, or this should change'. I want to be somebody who gets out there and stands up and says: 'Hey, let's try and change things, let's try and move things forward on the Central Coast for the better of the people who live here'.''
Former Australia fast bowler Nathan Bracken explains why he has has decided to go into politics. Bracken is standing for NSW central coast seat of Dobell, currently held by former Labor MP Craig Thomson. Here's hoping he has more success than 'Lord' Ted Dexter, who stood as the Tory candidate for Cardiff South East against Jim Callaghan back in 1964. Dexter memorably told an audience of dockers and steelworkers that any of them currently contemplating which school to send their son to "should seriously consider Eton" because he "personally had met Old Etonians who were racing correspondents and bookmakers". Dexter, who owned several Jaguars, as well as a couple of racehorses and some greyhounds, told his audience that he was, like them, "one who does work by the sweat of his brow". They didn't buy it. Callaghan's majority had been 868. By the time Dexter was done, it had risen to just under 8,000.
Those who remember Bracken may well think that a short campaign would suit him, seeing as his frail body meant to he had trouble running for more than 10 overs in a row.
BITTER? ME?
"They're good players, they're not great players. They're earning obscene amounts of money and they've got big egos, but they don't know the best way to go about it."
In his first interview since he was sacked as Australia's head coach , Mickey Arthur opens up about the troubles in the team. Arthur was even more damning about the men in charge of Australian cricket, saying: "I'm still really disappointed about how it all happened and what happened, because what they need now is exactly what we were doing. I just get annoyed because I put everything into it and I put my head on the line with a lot of big decisions and a lot of the people who were very keen for us to make those decisions then backtracked.''
STILL WANT MORE?
All the guardian's Ashes coverage is here, including Mike Selvey's view on Monty's escapades on the Sussex seaside, Vic Marks' take on Australia's troubles at No3 and an amusing little piece from Cerith Williams, a producer at Sunset + Vine, on the difficulties of putting together a highlights package on a match that is still being played.
Elsewhere, Gary Naylor provides the latest instalment of his wrap of the week in county cricket, and Jonathan Agnew pops up on the guardian's books podcast talking about 100 years of cricket writing.
CONTACT THE SPIN
Share whatever is on your mind this week by writing to andy.bull@theguardian.com
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