N.Z. looks set to win first warm-up match

Press, 28 May 1983, Page 56

N.Z. looks set to win first warm-up match

NZPA staff correspondent London The New Zealand cricket team should enjoy a comfortable start to their arduous three-month English campaign when it meets the World Cup minnow, Zimbabwe, in its first cup warm-up game at the weekend. The New Zealand team, even without the key players, Richard Hadlee and John Wright, who seem likely to continue with their English counties until early June, should have far too many guns for Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe qualified for the World Cup by comfortably winning the I.C.C. trophy for minor cricketing nations last year, but recently it was brought right down to earth by a young Australian touring side, and it began its warm-up matches in England with a disastrous 110-run defeat by

Derbyshire on a slow, turning wicket totally foreign to them. Conditions are likely to be somewhat similar at Moseley, near Birmingham, where it will meet New Zealand. The New Zealand manager, Sir Allan Wright, is keen that Hadlee and Wright should stay with Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire respectively until early next month so that the other 12 members of the World Cup squad can gain early experience of English conditions. Nothing has yet been finalised but the captain, Geoff Howarth, the third New Zealander playing county cricket, will join the squad and lead it against Zimbabwe. However, Hadlee and Wright are also likely to miss the New Zealanders’ game against a Surrey

county team, which is a benefit match for Howarth, before joining the squad in time for the tougher warmup encounters against India and Australia. Five warm-up games have been squeezed into 11 days before New Zealand plays its first World Cup match against England at the Oval on June 9. The English bookmakers are at present offering what appears to be rather generous odds of 12 to one on the New Zealanders winning the cup. The West Indies, winners of the last two-finals in 1975 and 1979, are clear favourites at evens, while Pakistan is at three to one, England at four to one and Australia at 11 to two. Pakistan and England are in New Zealand’s World Cup group along with Sri Lanka and the top two nations qualify for the semi-finals.