Kamal Ghorui
Zimbabwe captain Sikandar Raza stressed that reaching the Super 8s was only one milestone in a much bigger journey after his side progressed to the next stage of the T20 World Cup 2026 following a rain-hit fixture against Ireland at the Pallekele International Stadium on Tuesday.The abandoned match earned both teams a point each, taking Zimbabwe to five points in Group B and ending Australia’s hopes of advancing.
“The fact that we’ve qualified for the Super 8s hasn’t changed the ultimate goal that we set out for. Like I said, it’s just a tick in the box, but we have a lot of other goals to achieve and everybody loves an underdog story, don’t they?” Raza said.He reflected on Zimbabwe’s long qualification route, including the sub-regional stage featuring Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania.“I’ll take you back when we played the sub-regional qualifiers B, and we played the Kenya, the Rwanda, Tanzania, and all those teams. And I remember I stood up to my troops and I said, we are in this position or in this mess, as you want to call it, because of us. There’s no one else to blame. And only us that would get this mess clear and only us can get it out of it. So what are we gonna do about it? And we won the qualifiers B, regional sub-regional B, then the main qualifiers happened. We won that as well,” he said.Zimbabwe now enter a challenging Super 8 group alongside defending champions India, 2024 runners-up South Africa and two-time winners West Indies, needing a top-two finish to make the semi-finals.“Yeah, certainly so. Myself and the coach will sit down. We watched Sri Lanka in the last three games as well. We’re going to have the data on them and we try and put our best foot forward and try and win that game. That is the whole point of us being here,” Raza said of their preparation.“I think every condition we find ourselves in, if we can find a day or two to train, I think we’ll sum up the conditions really well and hopefully make those plans. One thing you can’t fight is the weather and conditions. So we try and learn those conditions if we can have two, three training days in a particular city, wherever we’re going to.”Before the Super 8s begin, Zimbabwe will take on co-hosts Sri Lanka in their final group-stage match at the R. Premadasa Stadium on Thursday.
