One Wicket, One Ball: Zimbabwe Take Australia to the Last Over of the Series and Still Lose

For eight days in Harare, Zimbabwe had been the better story and the worse team. They lost the 1st ODI by 59 runs and the 2nd by 84, and each time there was a passage of play in which they looked entirely at home against a side ranked a world away from them. What they had never done was hold that feeling all the way to the end of an innings.

On Sunday they held it for 99 overs and five balls. Zimbabwe made 271 for 8, defended it down to the final delivery of the match, and lost by one wicket. There is no column in the scorebook for what that is worth. There should be.

Zimbabwe batted first for the first time in the series and for a while it looked like the familiar shape: 34 for 1 in the seventh over, 48 for 2 in the ninth, 68 for 3 in the fifteenth, with Ben Curran gloving one down the leg side, Brian Bennett holing out after a brisk 30, and Brendan Taylor bowled by Adam Zampa in the middle overs.

What followed was the most patient cricket Zimbabwe played all series. Innocent Kaia and Craig Ervine added 80 in 87 balls, almost none of it spectacular — singles into the leg side, the cut shot whenever Xavier Bartlett dropped short, no attempt to force a rate that did not need forcing. Kaia had made 55 from 66 when he retired hurt with the score 148, and a Zimbabwe innings that had been rebuilt by attrition was handed to Sikandar Raza.

Raza did not attack immediately. He and Ervine put on 61, and when Ervine fell for 59 in the 41st over, Zimbabwe were 209 for 4 with the innings still needing a finish. Raza then lost Madhevere, Evans and Cremer around him — three wickets for 22 runs — and simply kept hitting into the gaps at the other end. His eighth-wicket stand with Ernest Masuku was worth 38 from 30 balls. He finished 81 not out from 72, seven fours and a six, and 271 on that surface was a total worth bowling at.

Australia were 25 for 2 inside four overs. Brad Evans had Travis Head caught in the second over and Mitchell Marsh caught behind in the fourth, and Harare Sports Club made the kind of noise that a ground makes when it starts to believe.

Josh Inglis walked in at No.4 and played the innings of the series. It was not a violent hundred — eleven fours, no sixes, a strike rate barely above a run a ball — and that was precisely the point. He added 52 with Cooper Connolly, then 85 with Alex Carey, and each time a partner departed he reset rather than accelerated. He reached his century in the 41st over and was bowled by Raza soon after for 103, Australia 227 for 8 and still 45 short.

The last hour belonged to Nathan Ellis. He had taken 3 for 50 with the ball; now he batted 44 deliveries for 36 not out, and when Adam Zampa was caught in the 46th over with 27 still required, Ellis was left with Spencer Johnson and 28 balls. They took it in ones and twos, refusing to give Zimbabwe the wicket that would have ended it, and the winning runs came with a single delivery left in the match.

Zimbabwe will look at this and find two things at once. The first is that they bowled the best they have bowled all series. Brad Evans took 4 for 47 from his ten overs, attacking the stumps in the powerplay and hitting a length that made driving dangerous. Raza (2 for 42) and Graeme Cremer (2 for 53) squeezed the middle overs and took the two wickets that mattered most. Six bowlers were used and four of them took a wicket.

The second is harder. Blessing Muzarabani finished the series with figures of 10-1-49-0, his third wicketless spell in three matches. He was accurate and he was quick and he did not threaten, and on a day when one wicket in his ten overs would have won Zimbabwe the game, that is the difference between a famous result and a fine one. Kaia's retirement — he was on 55 and set — took Zimbabwe's most settled batter out of the innings at exactly the wrong time, and 271 was probably fifteen short of what that surface would have given a full-strength batting card.

Harare in its third ODI in six days behaved the way a well-used pitch does: slower than the first two matches, with just enough hold in it that timing had to be earned rather than assumed. Zimbabwe's 271 came at 5.42 an over, the lowest first-innings rate of the series, and Australia's chase took all fifty overs for the first time on the tour. Spin was relevant rather than decisive — Zampa, Raza and Cremer bowled 29 overs between them for four wickets — and the part-time seam of Wessly Madhevere was quietly the most awkward bowling in the last ten, five overs and a wicket for 34. Neither innings ever accelerated the way a Harare pitch had allowed on Thursday. That is what made the finish possible.

Inglis has spent two years being described as an attacking wicketkeeper-batter, which is a compliment that quietly limits you. On Sunday he made 103 from 102 balls in a chase that had lost two wickets for 25, and he made it by refusing to play a single shot that the situation did not ask for.

The innings had a shape you could set a watch by: survive the new ball, take the singles from Cremer and Raza, punish anything that was full outside off, and keep the strike at the end of overs when the partner was new. Eleven fours and no sixes in a hundred on a slow pitch is not a coincidence — it is a decision, repeated for three hours. He did not see the end of it, and he still won the match.

We leaned towards Australia in the preview and they won, so the headline is right and the reasoning was mostly wrong. Our argument was that Australia's depth would out-resource Zimbabwe, and in the end it did — but through Josh Inglis and a No.9, not through the names we listed. We tipped Blessing Muzarabani to rediscover his World Cup hostility as the match that would rewrite the series; he bowled ten overs, conceded 49 and took none. We tipped Matt Renshaw as Australia's man to watch; he made 4 from 10 and bowled six tidy overs. We wrote that Zimbabwe's route to a win ran through their top four surviving the powerplay — they lost only one wicket in the first ten and still fell short, because the problem this time was not the start but Kaia's retirement and Muzarabani's silence. We also said the toss mattered and that Zimbabwe should bowl. They won it, chose to bat, and came within one delivery of winning the match. That one is ours to own.

Australia leave Harare with a 3-0 sweep, a Player-of-the-Series award for Cooper Connolly, and the knowledge that their tenth and eleventh batters can bat out a tight ODI chase — which is the sort of thing that only gets tested on tours like this and only matters at World Cups. Harare Sports Club will host matches at the 2027 World Cup, and Australia have now played three ODIs on it inside a week.

For Zimbabwe, the scoreline says whitewash and the cricket says something else. Their bowling group took nine wickets on a flat day; Raza, Ervine and Kaia all passed 50; Evans has now taken seven wickets in two matches. The gap that remains is the one that has been there all series — a senior fast bowler who takes wickets rather than contains, and a middle order that does not have to rebuild from 68 for 3 every time. Both of those are fixable. A one-wicket defeat is the kind that tells a team it is closer than the table suggests, provided it is not the third of its kind.