Bulawayo, Zimbabwe: Under the gaze of an enormous, old-fashioned manually-operated scoreboard, Zimbabwe came up with all the right numbers at the weekend as they qualified for the Twenty20 World Cup for the first time since 2016. Craig Ervine’s team clinched their ticket to Australia in October when they beat Papua New Guinea in their semi-final last Friday in the country’s second largest and southern city of Bulawayo.
They then iced the cake with a 37-run win over the Netherlands, who also qualified, in the final at the city’s Queens Sports Club, a throwback to another age when cricket did not rely so heavily on the bells and whistles of modern technology. Established in 1890 when Zimbabwe was still the British colony of Rhodesia, the ground was inevitably named after Queen Victoria. It became a regular venue for many touring sides and hosted its first Test match in 1994.
In spite of the coloured clothes and frenetic pace of a T20 match, there is still an old-world charm about Queens. The stately pavilion stands proud and the ground is ringed by trees that create a panoramic umbrella for spectators sitting on the grass out of the sun, making it one of the most picturesque venues in the world.
But one key feature stands out: the scoreboard which reaches back into the 20th century, perhaps even earlier, for its display and methods of delivering information to the public. A team of shadowy figures ghost their way around inside the great box, all black and yellow, manually changing names and numbers.
Adding up scores on the aged scoreboard, energetic young men, including aspiring cricketers and passionate fans, operate seamlessly in coordination with scorers waving papers from behind a glass screen in the media box some 200 metres away on the other side of the ground.
Hand gesture communication is sometimes overridden by radio communication to verify and clarify figures.
