Slides That Follow Your Voice: Zimbabwean Accent Club Dinner Speech

Slide 1: Hillcrest Wanderers

0:17Good evening, members, partners, parents, and the two boys at the back who are only here for the chicken. You are welcome. The chicken is after the speeches, which is the only reason anybody listens to the speeches. [laughs]

0:31My name is Tendai, I am the chairman of Hillcrest Wanderers, and this is the end-of-season dinner, the thirty-eighth one, which means the club is older than most of the people in this room and younger than the uh, the roller, which I will come to.

Slide 2: The 38th dinner

0:48Let me say first what kind of season it was. We played twenty-one, no, twenty-two matches. We won eleven, we lost nine, and two were rained off, one of them with us forty runs ahead and three overs left, which Brighton still talks about, and which I am now mentioning so that he does not have to. Brighton is saying it was forty-four. Fine. Forty-four. It is in the book as forty, Brighton, take it up with the book.

Slide 3: The season: fourth

1:17We finished fourth in the league, which is where we finished last year, and the year before, and I have started to describe fourth as our natural position, the way other people describe their height. [chuckles]

1:30The numbers that matter more. We have sixty-one playing members, up from forty-eight. The under-fifteens, who did not exist three years ago, now have twenty-six players, two coaches, and a kit that suits most of them. Subscriptions were paid by fifty-four of the sixty-one adults by the end of June, which is a club record, and the other seven know who they are, and so does Mrs Chikwanha at the bar, and she has a list.

Slide 4: The numbers that matter more: 61

1:59No? The list is real. Ask her. Okay.

2:03The ground. The outfield was cut thirty-one times this season by a man called Lovemore, who is not paid enough, and who is here, and who I would like you to stand for. Thank you. Sit, Lovemore, sit.

Slide 5: The ground: 31 cuts of the outfield

2:19The nets were rebuilt in March with money from the raffle, four thousand two hundred dollars, which is more than we have ever raised from a raffle, and which I think was mostly because the first prize was a goat, and the goat was present. [laughs] The goat is fine, by the way. It went to the Mutasa family, and it is called Raffle, and it has eaten part of a fence. I was going to say something else about the goat, and I have lost it. The roller. The scoreboard still does not work. We have stopped asking.

2:54Now, the, now, the roller. Now, the roller. The roller is a nineteen fifty-eight model, it weighs about a tonne and a half, it starts on the third attempt if you speak to it kindly, and it does not start at all if Brighton is nearby. It has been with the club longer than any member.

Slide 6: Now, the roller: 1958

3:13There is a proposal to replace it. I am not going to take sides tonight. All I will say is that when it starts, it rolls a better pitch than any in the league, that the committee votes in February, and that I will abstain, because I like it.

3:31Two thank-yous and I am done. To the partners and the parents, who have given up twenty-two Saturdays and have not once, to my face, complained.

Slide 7: Two thank-yous

3:42And to the captain, Rudo, who took over in a year when nobody wanted the job, who dropped herself from the first team in August because she thought the form did not justify the place, and who, you know, I think is the best thing that has happened to this club since the roller, club since the roller. [sighs] She is telling me to sit down. She is right. She is usually right, you know, that is the problem with her. Rudo, thank you.

Slide 8: The chicken is ready.

4:11That is my report. The chicken is ready. Go on, boys. Go. Before the committee.