BLOEMFONTEIN, March 12: Andy Pycroft has quit as a Zimbabwe selector, saying he, along with the coach and captain of the World Cup squad, had been sidelined by the national cricket administrators.

“When we sat down to pick the side for the match against Kenya, it became clear that there was already a team and it was non-negotiable,” Pycroft said on Wednesday.

This appeared to be the climax of a series of incidents in which communications between Pycroft and Zimbabwe’s selection convener, Ali Shah, were strained.

“I was in process of helping pick the team for the New Zealand match when the convener called me and said he was having difficulty communicating with me,” said Pycroft.

“I found this strange, because I was with the team most of the time, I talked often with the manager of the team, and I even had dinner with the chairman.

“So I called the convener, and asked him what the heck was going on, and he said there were some things that weren’t getting communicated to me.”

Pycroft, a former Test batsman and captain for Zimbabwe, was brought back onto the panel just before the World Cup.

“It was to bring a bit of credibility into the selection panel; being a former player, they didn’t have a lot of that on the panel,” he said.

Pycroft was surprised at the problems he encountered with selecting the team for the Kenya match.

“There were a couple of players in the side who were non-negotiable. And this was done without people knowing the conditions in Bloemfontein, let alone the status of the various injuries in the squad,” he said.

He insisted that those players appeared to have nothing to do with political agendas: “It wasn’t about color in the side, as far as I was concerned.”

“So I asked if they needed my input, and said, if they didn’t need my contribution, I should perhaps leave,” he said.

“What makes things worse was that it was not only me who was in the dark. It was also the captain and the coach.”—APP/AP