Kenya captain Jimmy Kamande has urged his team to give veteran batsman Steve Tikolo a fitting send-off against Zimbabwe at Eden Gardens on Sunday. Tikolo, 39, has been an integral part of all five of Kenya's World Cup campaigns and has announced that he will retire after the current tournament, the match against Zimbabwe his last for Kenya.
"We call him 'Gunnzie' (one who bats like a gun)," said Kamande. "He is a legend. He is the man, actually, who made me play one-day international cricket and he is the one who made us qualify for the first time in the 1996 World Cup. I remember watching him play in the qualifiers in 1995 and we owe a lot to the guy. Hopefully, we will send him off with a win."
A towering figure in Kenyan cricket and for a time widely held to be the best batsman outside the Test arena, Tikolo played his first representative match for Kenya against Zimbabwe in Nairobi in 1993 at the age of just 21 - a match that Kenya actually won by three wickets - and top-scored with 65 in Kenya's first ever World Cup game, against India at the Barabati Stadium in Cuttack in 1996.
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