Paul Stirling is hungry for more success after leading Ireland to an historic first away series win in Zimbabwe and believes today’s opening clash holds the key to winning the three-match one-day international series in Harare.

Stirling, the new white-ball skipper, saw his side overcome an opening loss on Thursday to take the T20 series 2-1, but starting slowly has long been a feature of Ireland’s performances overseas, both on tour and in tournaments.

“We haven’t had the best of results at the start of series, so if we can somehow turn that around and take a 1-0 lead that will stand us in good stead, and tick off a couple of areas that we’ve already looked to improve on,” he said..

“One of the pleasing things about winning the T20s is that we weren’t at 100 percent. We have a lot of areas to work on. That’s our challenge now, particularly in the first match.”

Harry Tector, the Player-of-the-Series in the T20s, will look to maintain his remarkable run of form in ODIs that has seen the YMCA batter score four centuries as well as seven fifties since the start of last year, at an average of 61.

While left-arm speedster Josh Little is back to somewhere near his best with the ball after a difficult year, and his clashes with Sean Williams and Sikandar Raza in the first T20 show the fire is back in his belly as well.

If Ireland do prevail, Stirling can claim it as his second ODI series win because he was stand-in captain, in the absence of Covid-quarantined Andy Balbirnie, when the Boys in Green beat the West Indies in Jamaica at the start of 2022.

“That was the first time that we’d won an overseas series in the ODI format against a Test playing nation, and now the challenge is to try to win here too,” he said.

"The first game of the series is so vital. We want to try and go into the two matches at the weekend [Friday and Sunday] with a 1-0 lead. That’s definitely something I can’t really remember us doing in the past.”

Meanwhile, the row over TV rights, that saw Irish fans unable to view the T20 series, was resolved yesterday with the ODIs to be streamed on icc.tv.