Thakur appointed as national coach

Cricket Namibia has appointed Dee Thakur as the senior team’s head coach until the end of next year.
Chief executive officer Donovan Zealand announced last week that Thakur would lead the team until 2017.
Thakur was appointed as the interim coach last year August when Doug Watson opted not to renew his contract.
Thakur led the team to the Africa Twenty20 (T20) Cup in South Africa last year.
He said the national team was preparing for the upcoming season, during which they would be competing in the annual Africa Cup in September.
He added that the team would travel to Papua New Guinea to compete in the ICUP and World Cricket League Championships in October.
Thakur said the team was not yet at the level they should be.
“I am grateful for the opportunity and we will have to work on our grey areas, mainly conditioning, which I believe will get us forward when we work on that,” he said.
The cricket board also appointed Clinton Henry as the physiotherapist and fitness and conditioning coach.
Cricket Namibia also appointed its board members last weekend, with Richard Frankle retaining his position as president for another two-year term.
Frankle said he embarked on a journey two years ago when he was appointed as the president and he was still on that journey to ensure that the game gets bigger and better.
“I will in this term learn from my mistakes and with this good board we want to bring huge improvements to school and women’s cricket,” he said.
“I am going to focus on development as we want to take the game to different regions and schools, so this will be the year of action,” he added.

Development

The cricket development programme has been expanded to include more schools and Cricket Namibia has trained seven additional coaches who will be deployed in different regions.
“This programme will be introduced in traditionally non-cricket-playing communities and we’ll exploit this wealth of untapped talent throughout Namibia,” said Zealand.
He said Cricket Namibia aimed at reaching more youngsters from marginalised and rural communities.
“Our challenge however remains to convert those softball players into hardball cricketers and future Namibian national players,” he said.
Cricket Namibia will be hosting age-group tournaments in Windhoek next month.
The age groups will be under-13, under-15 and under-17. Two teams from each age group will participate. Teams from Zimbabwe and South Africa’s Western Province will also participate.
“Our juniors have consistently produced exceptional results in inter-provincial tournaments in the past and we are confident that the tournament will be good preparation for the provincial tournaments,” he said.
The women cricketers have been invited to an eight-nation tournament to be held towards the end of August in Botswana.
KAINO NGHITONGO