The first of those will see them alongside West Indies, Ireland and Scotland in the Group B qualifiers. Conditions in Hobart during October are likely to be significantly different to Townsville in late August, but for a team that hasn’t been to Australia in seven years, every opportunity is an important one to gather little nuggets of intel and experience that could be useful.
“It’s massive,” Chakabva said. “It’s the first time in Australia for a whole load of guys and they’ll be looking to soak in the conditions as much as we can and certainly keeping an eye on that T20 World Cup in a few weeks’ time.”
The second of the major ambitions – next year’s ODI World Cup – will require them to go through the qualifying event which they will host. The belief has grown over recent weeks in what they are capable of in the ODI format, with the series victory over Bangladesh and pushing India close in the last game of that series having been blown away in the first two outings.
“It’s obviously a bit of a road for us until we get there,” Chakabva said. “We’ve been trying to work a lot on our game in one-day cricket in particular leading up to that. The tours that we’ve had, including this one, are all on the path to that qualification for us and certainly, we’ll be picking up all the big lessons that we can. We want to take a lot of pride in our cricket and how we go about our games.”
Zimbabwe have barely had time to adjust to the timezone since arriving in Townsville on Thursday evening, but Chakabva was taking it in his stride. “I’m sure we’ll be all good by tomorrow, a few sleepy heads on the bus yesterday back to the hotel,” he said with a smile. “It’s kind of what professional cricket is at this point in time. Don’t have a lot of time to get used to conditions so in the couple of sessions we have we just have to get the most out of it.”
“We’ve sat down as batting, fast bowling and spin group to go through strengths and weakness and identify game plans for each player. I know their top order has changed around a bit. So depending on what they come with we still feel we have some solid plans.”