Zimbabwe and Kenya open their doors to Australia and Sri Lanka on Monday determined again to prove that both England and New Zealand were wrong to boycott planned World Cup matches in their troubled countries.
World champions Australia, with a perfect record of three wins from three matches, arrived in Bulawayo to be met by a helicopter gunship and an armed escort ahead of their match at the Queens Sports Club.
Meanwhile, the gentile surroundings of the Nairobi Gymkhana ground resembled a mini-fortress with an elite anti-terrorist unit from South Africa having been flown into the country to reinforce Kenyan police.
Ricky Ponting’s Australian team arrived in Zimbabwe’s second city in a specially-chartered Boeing 737 late Sunday and were then given an armed escort into the city centre, some 20 kilometres away.
The Australians, unlike England who boycotted their game in Harare, have made it clear they want to be in and out of Zimbabwe as quickly as possible and Ponting was offering no excuses for the flying visit.
”Our stay is short because a lot of things are happening and it reduces the chance of anything else happening,” he said of their stay which represents a half-way house between a boycott, where they would lose the points, and a normal stay of three days.
”It means a lack of preparation time because we will only be here for 30 hours or so,” said the skipper.
In Nairobi, Sri Lanka and Kenya renew their rivalry in a game overshadowed by another huge security operation with local forces backed up by South African anti-terrorist officers.
The reinforced security did nothing to ease the fears of New Zealand who forfeited their scheduled match of February 21, the Kiwis’ decision not to play enraging the Kenyans who spent $70 000 upgrading the Nairobi Gymkhana Club and providing security and accommodation for the players.
Sri Lanka saw no reason not to travel to Kenya — perhaps as a pay-back for the gesture their hosts showed when they honoured, against all security precautions, their preliminary match of the 1996 World Cup in the Sri Lankan town of Kandy.
In that game, Sri Lanka piled up a record World Cup total of 395-5 from 50 overs with Aravinda De Silva contributing a career-best 145 off 115 balls.
The Kenyans replied with their own World Cup best of 254-7 to lose by 144 runs and then reduced the gap four years later when they lost by only 47 runs at Southampton, England.
It was that match which saw the Kenyan pair of Maurice Odumbe and Alpesh Vadher share a world record sixth-wicket partnership of 161 runs. – Sapa