That long 21-month wait is now over and Trent Bridge in Nottingham will be the location of just the fourth four-day Test match in history.
England have given Zimbabwe cricket the respect not only of the first Test between the two nations in 22 years, but also one of their strongest possible Test lineups imaginable with 33-year-old captain Ben Stokes back from a hamstring injury and almost every member of the expected squad for the five-game series against India present.
The only exception is that star all-rounder Jacob Bethell was given clearance to return to the IPL for a potential title-winning campaign with RCB, which would have opened the door for Jordan Cox to make his Test debut as a batter were it not for a side strain that ruled him out and potentially gives Somerset’s James Rew an opportunity.
Setting foot on English soil in itself is a win for Zimbabwe, particularly as ECB chair Richard Gould opted to pay their board a non-mandatory appearance fee as part of his bid to make international cricket financially fairer. The four-day model may upset the purists, but surely this is a better alternative to the past two decades!
Why England can win
The 13-man squad chosen by England, which includes three Test-capped fast bowlers (Gus Atkinson, Matthew Potts, Josh Tongue) as well as Shoaib Bashir, indicates just how seriously they’ll be taking this fixture.
Brydon Carse would have been selected too were it not for the toe injury that ended his Champions Trophy campaign early in February, as team management instead opted to bring him back via the County Championship with the five-game series against India in mind.
England have a formidable 14 wins from 19 home Tests since Brendon McCullum was appointed as coach (D1, L4) including comfortable wins over both New Zealand (five wickets) and the West Indies (241 runs) at Trent Bridge, where they piled on three 400+ run scores in addition to a run chase of 299/5.
Whilst no international side can afford complacency these days, the full strength England squad will be an enormous step up in class from a County Select XI side that defeated Zimbabwe by 138 runs in a tour game in Leicester last week. Considering that the team consisted of second XI red-ball players not on county duty and that Zimbabwe were playing with 13 men, it’s a pretty alarming result in what was their one and only warm-up.
Why Zimbabwe can win
The tourists are facing their most decisive and important calendar year in more than a decade, with finances stabilising at boardroom level and 11 Tests to be played in the 2025 calendar year - the joint-most of any of the 12 ICC full members. A concerted campaign from top to bottom has set out to get Zimbabwean cricket back into the top-tier after the embarrassing failures to qualify for both the ODI and T20 World Cups in recent years.
They’ll be better for the run in Leicester last week where, despite taking only 17 wickets on a docile pitch, there were many positives from a batting perspective: Brian Bennett, Sean Williams, Wessly Madhevere, Tafadzwa Tsiga and Nick Welch all recorded at least one half-century in the match.
Adding to the wealth of Test experience in a squad captained by 39-year-old Craig Ervine is Sikandar Raza, who left the Pakistan Super League on Monday to jet over to Nottingham for just his second Test appearance of 2025 after scoring 99 match runs in a loss at home to Afghanistan earlier this year.
Despite winning just one of their last 12 Tests (D2, L9), the bowling unit has taken 70 of a possible 70 wickets this year and there’ll be hope amongst the camp that they can improve significantly upon their tour match performance. It might be a tough sell to claim they’re a realistic chance of winning this Test, but there’s so much on the line that Zimbabwe cannot afford to be uncompetitive.
Venue and conditions
The two Trent Bridge Tests of 2024 and 2022 had a combined collective batting average of 41.55 (47.97) and Nottinghamshire’s four home matches of this County Championship season, which produced a batting average of 34.37, pointed to some similarly healthy conditions for batting.
The four-day format will only encourage England, who have drawn just one of their 35 Tests during the McCullum-Stokes era, to play their delightfully flamboyant style of batting throughout the match to push a result along.
The threat of showers on Saturday in Nottingham could also come into the strategising of the home side, though any potential rain is unlikely to take a significant chunk of time out of the match.
Player stats
• Joe Root scored 50+ runs in seven of his 14 Test innings at Trent Bridge (avg 70.92), whilst Ollie Pope did so in three of his six (avg 60.17)
• Sean Williams is the only player to top score for Zimbabwe in at least three Test innings since the start of 2024
• Zak Crawley has scored just 40 runs from six innings at Trent Bridge (avg 6.67, best of 27, two ducks)
• Blessing Muzarabani (32) and Richard Ngarava (15) claimed nearly half of Zimbabwe’s 96 Test wickets since the beginning of 2024
• Shoaib Bashir claimed figures of 7-149 in England’s Trent Bridge win over West Indies
Written by Aaron Murphy (X: @AaronMurphyFS)