Cricket World Cup: Johnson dashes Kenyan promise

Kenya 229-7 (50 overs) Zimbabwe 231-5 (41 overs) A Vadher 54, R Shah 37 N C Johnson 59, A Flower 34 A D R Campbell 33no N C Johnson 4-42 T Odoyo 2-40, M Odumbe 2-39 Zimbabwe win by five wickets

NOT QUITE a carnival. Zimbabwe's free-scoring batsmen got in the mood, but there was only a little music, no dancing to speak of, and the noise came intermittently from small sections of a decent, but not full, house in Taunton.

The memorable peculiarity of it was not from the Zimbabweans, who were mostly indistinguishable from English football fans, but from the excited barrage of encouragement in Swahili when a young man called Tom Odoyo hit sixes in successive balls and scored 17 in an over towards the end of Kenya's innings.

The BBC had described this as a battle of the minnows, which is nonsense; after all, Zimbabwe won a Test series against Pakistan last winter. It could be more accurately described as the Championship of Africa north of the Zambezi River. But, after a promising start, it was no contest. Kenya have a decent batting line-up, and thrilling catches were taken, but the bowling was nowhere near international class.

Zimbabwe's progress towards the winning total was more often spectacular than steady. For example, Neil Johnson, having already taken four Kenyan wickets, then scored 40 out of his half-century in boundaries. "It came on to the bat beautifully today," he said. When he finally holed out on the mid-wicket boundary, his 59 had come in 70 balls, the score was 123 for 3, and he was already the only legitimate contender for Man of the Match.

After he had gone, Alistair Campbell and Grant Flower were even more prodigious with their sixes. The winning margin was not so much the wickets as the overs; there were nine left when Zimbabwe overhauled their target of 229. Campbell believes that wickets like this will lead to much higher scores than anyone expected before the tournament began.

The weather turned fine in the afternoon, but first thing in the morning the sky was overcast and there was a chill in the air. Kenya lost the toss and were put in to bat. The auguries were no better than they had been for Sri Lanka the day before at Lord's, therefore Zimbabwe's slack first few overs came as a nice surprise to Kenya.

At the start, Zimbabwe bowled and fielded like a club side that had spent too much time in the bar the night before. Heath Streak is perfectly named for a fast bowler, but yesterday his bowling was streaky and Mbangwa is more difficult to spell than his bowling was to read - Ravindu Shah and Kennedy Otieno carted the bowling all over the ground. Only when Johnson came on did the pair of them look at all discomposed.

Johnson had spent a year playing for Leicestershire in 1997, and he knew how to bowl on just such an overcast morning in May. He frequently bent the ball past the bat and extracted some bounce out of a good batting wicket. But by the time Otieno finally edged Johnson to Andy Flower behind the wicket, Kenya had scored 62 runs in the 13th over of their innings.

Soon after, Ravinda Shah cut Andy Whittall lamely to Paul Strang at point, but after 15 overs Kenya stood at a respectable 72 for 2. The pity of the innings was the dismissal, for nine runs, of Steve Tikolo, who is the best batsman in the Kenyan side. He clearly thought the umpire Javed Akhtar had made a mistake adjudging him caught behind - and we know from Headingley last year he is capable of them - though the replay showed it was a close thing.

Johnson kept on coming back and kept on taking important wickets, just as Streak kept on conceding runs. After the flurry in the final five overs, Johnson's figures were 4 for 42 and Streak's 0 for 50. At 229 for 7 Kenya had scored 30 or so fewer runs than they would have wished, but they had also shown that England are capable of handling Zimbabwe's bowling attack.

Incidentally, the carnival aspect of the Cup may be provided by wides. At Lord's on Friday there were 21 wides; yesterday the number rose to 41. Campbell had no criticism of the umpires. "Our 25 wides are inexcusable," he said.