'I can make an impact' – Brendan Taylor eyes international comeback after sanction ends
He had initially considered moving into coaching but has been convinced to resume playing with an eye on the 2027 ODI World Cup
Firdose Moonda21-Mar-2025Former Zimbabwe captain Brendan Taylor, currently serving a three-and-half-year ban for breaching the ICC’s anti-corruption code, is eyeing an international comeback when his sanction ends in July.Taylor, 39, had initially considered a move into coaching but has been convinced to resume his playing career by Zimbabwe Cricket’s MD Givemore Makoni, with a view to playing the 2027 ODI World Cup, which Zimbabwe will co-host. Taylor will be eligible to play again on July 25 this year.”I still want to play and I believe I could make an impact as a player,” Taylor told ESPNcricinfo. “I look at where I’m at physically and mentally and if I didn’t feel I could do it, I wouldn’t bother. Givemore has really supported me on this. He sort of shut down the coaching role for now and said, ‘Can you play and try to push yourself up until the 2027 World Cup?’ Granted I’ll be 41 then but with sobriety, I’m living my truest form.”Related
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Taylor admitted to drug and alcohol addiction problem at the same time he revealed an approach by match-fixers to spot fix after they filmed him using cocaine. He was threatened with the video being made public if he did not cooperate with them. Instead of going through with the fix, Taylor abruptly retired from international cricket in September 2021 and did not reveal the reasons. He only reported the incident to the ICC four months later and made the story public in January 2022.At that point, Taylor also checked himself into a rehabilitation centre in Zimbabwe’s Nyanga region on the Mozambique border. He spent 90 days there, with one other patient and a sponsor who “showed me a new way to live”. He has since been clean and has started a private coaching facility at his home as well as, more recently, a gradual return to training.The conditions of his sanction mean Taylor cannot play any officially recognised cricket or train with domestic or international sides. Instead, he has been using facilities at an elite independent school, St John’s College in Harare, often twice a day.Brendan Taylor feels inspired by the likes of Sean Williams•Getty Images”They’ve got some great grass nets and I spend a lot of time in the indoor high-performance centre there. I get in there nice and early, and I come back in the afternoon and do it all again and push myself,” Taylor said. “There’s lots of work to do, but I feel like I’m there. I’m not far off. I’ve been doing some batting, and I need to incorporate some fielding and some keeping work because I’ve got four months to go.”Although “it would have been great to be able to”, Taylor will not be cleared to play by the time of Zimbabwe’s Test in England in May – their first against that opposition in more than two decades. But he hopes to be in the plans for a home series against New Zealand in August.That will be followed by Zimbabwe’s hosting of the Africa Regional Qualifiers for next year’s T20 World Cup in September, though Taylor feels he has some work to do on his T20 game, where he has a strike rate of 123.96. “I see myself definitely playing Tests and ODIs. With T20s, that’s probably something I would have to really try and sharpen myself up at. But I look forward to that.”
“Having a home World Cup is quite special and we’ve had some heartache over these last few World Cups so hopefully we can turn that around”
Should his comeback be successful, Taylor will be the fourth player in the Zimbabwe side in his late 30s, after Test and ODI captain Craig Ervine (39), T20I captain Sikandar Raza (38), and long-serving allrounder Sean Williams (also 38). It’s in watching their performances that Taylor has found the belief that he has something more to contribute.”That’s been inspiring to me. If you look statistically, they’re at the top of the game. They’re still some of the biggest contributors in the national side, and that’s really given me that hope and belief that I can do this,” he said. “And it’s also about me just adding real service to the group. It’s not an egotistical individual coming back trying to steal any headlines or anything like that. I’ve been humbled properly. I look forward to really just adding value, which I probably didn’t do to the best of my ability when I was there before.”Ultimately it’s the feeling of having unfinished business that is calling Taylor back to playing. “I wish I had offered a bit more to Zimbabwe cricket. I’ve apologised and moved forward from that and I want to work with them.”Taylor is also motivated by the idea of the home World Cup, especially as Zimbabwe have missed out on the last two ODI showpieces and he considers the 2015 tournament, where he was the fourth-highest run-scorer, the peak of his career.”Having a home World Cup is quite special and we’ve had some heartache over these last few World Cups so hopefully we can turn that around,” he said. ” The balance in our group is, I think, the best it has ever been and there’s a huge drive from Zimbabwe Cricket to get this right and get things in place. For Givemore, this World Cup means the whole world to him. He just wants to get this right and put on a good show and I want to be reciprocal in that.”