Namibia recorded a seven-wicket win with 32 balls to spare after restricting Zimbabwe to 132 for 8 at the Wanderers Cricket Ground in Windhoek. Performances in this tournament are crucial because the top two teams are the only ones that advance to the T20 World Cup in 2024.

“When you ask what went wrong, as far as I’m concerned, we got it all wrong,” Houghton said. “Today we were horrible, embarrassingly bad. It’s probably one of the worst games I’ve ever been associated with in a Zimbabwe shirt.

“I have no idea why this is happening. We trained hard, we trained in specifics. The boys worked very hard, they had enough energy for this game, but we batted poorly and kept bowling poorly and our fielding was average.”

“When you’re not playing particularly well and when you’ve lost a bit of confidence like we have, we see demons on the wicket when we bat, but when we bowl there are no demons on the wicket,” Houghton said. “So, I looked at that wicket and it looks like a good stretch of batting and I would have thought we would score 170-180 comfortably.

“We gave away a lot of wickets, we weren’t batting positively, we are batting recklessly at the moment. I thought it was a really good batting wicket and they showed it when they chased us.”

“We can’t dwell on these losses. It’s important that they recognize how serious the loss was, which is what I just told them in the locker room, but it’s a quick recovery and that’s good, we can fix everything tomorrow afternoon and get on the board with a victory and then begin our march towards qualification.

“We can’t rest on our laurels and think that we are a bigger team than the rest. We have to show up and play proper cricket.”

The other teams in the Qualifier are Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe’s opponent on Thursday, Tanzania. They all face each other in a round-robin format in a race to accumulate the most points and reach the next Men’s T20 World Cup.