Shortly before Christmas in 2023, the fortunes of Zimbabwe's men's team turned on a selfless act. Head coach Dave Houghton resigned from his post, not because he was being pushed, but because he felt it was best for the team he had led for the previous 18 months.

His appointment midway through 2022 had brought a wave of optimism, triggering belief in a Zimbabwe revival. "There was immediate euphoria," Houghton recalls, "and we won the T20 qualification for the 2022 World Cup in Bulawayo. The country got behind the brand of cricket we were playing. At that World Cup (in Australia), we beat Pakistan and were very close to beating Bangladesh, which would have put us near the semi-finals."

Yet it was not to last.

"After we lost a 50-over World Cup qualifier to Scotland in Bulawayo (in 2023)-a game we'd win 99 times out of 100 - you could feel the air go out of the balloon," Houghton says. "The players lost belief. I probably should have walked then, but I stayed for the next T20 qualifiers, where we managed to lose to Uganda. I noticed the energy was gone while watching the team in the field, and that's when I made my mind up to let someone new in."

In his resignation, Houghton spoke of "losing the dressing room", but he explains there was no animosity - the players just weren't absorbing his words like they had in the first part of his tenure. "As soon as that happens, it's time for a new person," he says. "I felt like I was saying the same things and the guys weren't listening as well as they should have been. A new voice comes in, and now they are back up to where they were."

Stepping aside for the betterment of the collective is unusual in sports, where the competitive environment can encourage an overinflated sense of self belief. But Houghton was working for an organisation that was rebuilding the game through selfless acts - for the previous five years Zimbabwe Cricket had been on an austerity programme designed to wipe out the high-interest debts that had crippled the game.

"Most of our staff took a 30% cut in salary to ensure that we were able to live within our means," says ZC managing director Givemore Makoni. "So that affected most of the staff. It didn't affect players. We had to refocus and show that we were all about cricket, and all about the players, and also about the game itself."

This ethos had been present during the 1980s and early 1990s, when Houghton was a player and national captain. In that era, a can-do cricket culture was fuelled entirely by volunteers who had nothing to gain for themselves beyond having a good game and a good time. This was also the basis for people such as Makoni to found and develop Takashinga Cricket Club in Highfields, a high-density suburb in Harare, and give emerging black talent an entry point to the game.

Larger cricket nations might get by without such selfless acts, and be able to run on the drive of capital alone, but ones of Zimbabwe's size need them. And they went badly missing in the 2000s and 2010s when the opposite behaviour became par for the course. Much of this came from the top - state looting by President Robert Mugabe and his cronies was echoed within the cricket structures. Scarcity culture throttled the country, its cricket, and everyone involved. No longer was it about what each person could do for the game; it was about what the game could do for each person. If you had a job, or a place in the national side, or a full salary, you clung to it like a life raft.

Happily, the selfless acts have returned over the past decade. They started when Tavengwa Mukuhlani came back from a lengthy exile to chair the Zimbabwe Cricket board. Who, one might wonder, would take on an unpaid role to dig an organisation out of $27 million of debt, and resolve the debilitating cost that comes with a filthy reputation in the world game? The first real signs of that turnaround were felt at that World Cup in 2022, by which time the debt had been erased, players were being paid on time, and domestic structures were being reinstated.

Yet sometimes two steps forward are followed by a step back, as the real resilience of an underlying cricket infrastructure is revealed. So it was for Zimbabwe with the qualifying defeats in 2023.

"That was a setback, but because of the processes that we'd got ourselves into, it was just a temporary setback," says Makoni. "As a country and a Test nation we've got a clear strategy, and that has really worked perfectly for us - as you can see with the team's performances in this (2026) World Cup. I think over the past three years we've played more cricket than most full members, and it could only translate into what we are seeing now. That's something that we intend to continue."

Among the fixtures that ZC has created for a team that had previously been through long spells without sufficient cricket, were 10 Test matches in 2025 - the most of any Test nation. "That has had a huge impact in terms of game time and game awareness, Makoni points out. "We see ourselves as a Test nation and Test cricket is non-negotiable - it's a format that we have to play and it is a format that can accelerate growth in terms of player improvement."

Houghton sees an increasing game awareness among the national side as the biggest development in the time that he has been around, observing that Zimbabwe's three victories in the group stage of the T20 World Cup looked different to previous successes.

"When I came back five or six years ago to take over the national team, I was struck by the amount of talent there is around the place. What was lacking was awareness and tactics," he says. "I tried to get into that area as much as possible, and now Justin Sammons and his coaching team have taken that on unbelievably. You can see that they know exactly what they're doing; it doesn't look like we win by accident anymore. In the past, we've beaten big sides with an outstanding game thrown in, but this looks different. These guys look like they can beat the big sides all the time, and I really can't praise Justin and his staff enough."

Yet this is unlikely to be the peak for Zimbabwe - if anything they are just getting started. The country's population has grown by 50 per cent over the past 25 years, from 12 million in 2001 to an estimated 18 million today. A further 5 million Zimbabweans are believed to live outside of the country. And ZC are working hard to make cricket available to as many people as possible.

Takashinga has been transformed from a sorry place in 2017, when more people came to watch football on television in the bar than to watch cricket on the ground, to a thriving hub of development. It has hosted World Cup qualifiers and the Under-19 World Cup, and now houses 18 boys in an academy that is overseen by former national captain Elton Chigumbura.

New high performance centres are close to completion near Bulawayo and at Harare Sports Club, and Houghton has led a high performance squad on a tour of England for the past two years. Brian Bennett and Dion Myers are among the graduates. Meanwhile new grounds are under development in Mutare, Gweru and Victoria Falls - the latter is expected to host its first domestic games later this year, and ZC intends to hold two matches there during next year's 50-over World Cup, which Zimbabwe will co-host with South Africa and Namibia.

With the growing interest in cricket in the country, and improving programmes and facilities, that World Cup offers potential for a whole other spark. "I mean the vibe in Zim...cricket is now the fastest growing sport," says Makoni. "Every kid wants to take up the sport. We have introduced the Kumusha Cricket-Ekhaya programme where we take the game to the rural areas. We've had a success story with the (urban) high-density areas, especially with Takashinga. Our strategic objective is to become the number one sport in the country. I think we have the potential to overtake football in Zim - it's something that we're really working on. I mean we're filling stadiums. The game has become more Zimbabwean, if you look at the numbers of players and fans, and it reflects the demographics of the country. We've laid the foundation for the game to boom."

This enthusiasm is shared by Houghton, who has observed the improvements closely. "The only area that needs tidying up is our pathway for age-group cricket, which is currently a bit disjointed," he says. "Once they tie schools, high-density programmes, and academies together, the game will grow very quickly. Right now, cricket is number one and flying."

Usurping football as the number one sport in the country is a lofty ambition on the domestic front, so what are Zimbabwe reaching for internationally?

"We've shown in this World Cup that we can really compete, and I think with enough investment and a lot of hard work, we have the potential to even lift some of these trophies or go all the way to the semi-final or final," Makoni says. "Yeah, we have the talent. Zimbabweans are talented, especially cricketers. It's just the investment that was lacking. But at the moment we are all about cricket, nothing else. I think that world cricket is richer with Zimbabwe involved. Not just Zimbabwe, but a competitive Zimbabwean team."