Our #WCW today is Mary-Anne Musonda, a 32 year old Zimbabwean Cricketer and the current captain of the Zimbabwean women’s national cricket team. Musonda was born in Harare to a Zimbabwean mother and a Zambian father and she is the youngest in a family of four children. She attended Hermann Gmeiner Primary School in Harare and Kwekwe High School in Kwekwe where she passed with flying colours.
Growing up, Musonda participated in a lot of sporting activities. Initially, she focused on Hockey. She was then recruited to play Cricket and became a Cricket player. She also played Basketball, Volleyball and Netball.
Musonda was an all-rounder in school Cricket. She started out bowling pace, but later switched to off spiner after suffering an injury. Her coach Majawa encouraged her to believe she would be an excellent cricketer and she modelled her game around that of her favourite player, Charllote Edwards.
Less than a year old after Musonda took up Cricket, she was included in a probable, but unofficial 13 for the National Women’s Team squad. She then went up.on her first tour as part of the National Team in 2006.
On 5 January 2019, the month after her appointment, Musonda made her Women’s Twenty20 International (WT20I) debut for Zimbabwe against Namibia, at the start of a five-match T20I tour of Namibia, which Zimbabwe won 5–0. Musonda also topped the overall batting table for that tour, with an aggregate of 140 at an average of 70. Before returning home, the team competed against Kenya and Uganda in the Victoria Tri-Series in Kampala, Uganda, and also won that tournament.
Musonda was then to have led the team on a tour of Ireland and the Netherlands in July 2019, but that tour was cancelled at the last minute after the ICC moved to freeze all funding to Zimbabwe. Soon afterwards, the ICC barred Zimbabwe from all ICC events, including the ICC Women’s World Twenty20 Qualifier in Scotland in August 2019, for which the national team had already qualified. Musonda considers Zimbabwe’s exclusion from that tournament to be the worst moment of her career; the ICC ban on Zimbabwe was lifted after only three months, but soon afterwards the COVID-19 pandemic began. In February 2021, Musonda was named as the captain of Zimbabwe’s squad for its home 50-over and T20I series against Pakistan, which were scheduled as the national team’s first matches since the onset of the pandemic. However, that tour was ended abruptly after only one match, because of flight restrictions associated with the pandemic.
In April 2021, the ICC gave Zimbabwe Women’s One Day International (WODI) status. In October 2021, Musonda was named as the captain of Zimbabwe’s WODI squad for their four-match series against Ireland. The fixtures were Zimbabwe’s first WODI matches gaining WODI status. Musonda made her WODI debut on 5 October 2021, against Ireland. Zimbabwe won the match by four wickets, with Musonda scoring an unbeaten century, and sharing in three half-century stands. She was only the sixth woman to score a century on ODI debut, the first ever to do so while captaining her team, and the first to score any international century for Zimbabwe.
In November 2021, Musonda was named as the captain of Zimbabwe’s team for the 2021 Women’s Cricket World Cup Qualifier tournament in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe lost two of its first three matches in the tournament, and defeated the United States by only one wicket. The rest of the tournament was then cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2022, Musonda again led her team in the Capricorn Women’s Tri-Series in Windhoek, Namibia, except in one of its matches against Uganda, when she was rested and Josephine Nkomo stood in for her. After losing its first match to Namibia by seven wickets, Zimbabwe won all five of its remaining matches, including the final, also against Namibia, and also by seven wickets. During one of Zimbabwe’s matches in the series, against Uganda, Musonda was, unusually, given out for obstructing the field. She had defended a ball from Janet Mbabazi which then rebounded towards her stumps, then gently hit the ball back to Mbabazi while remaining in her crease at all times.
