Australia's under-19 cricket World Cup campaign has gotten off to a shaky start, with the triple champions beaten by Zimbabwe in their first warm-up game.
The African nation won by three wickets with nine balls to spare in a low-scoring contest in Abu Dhabi on Monday.
Opting to bat first, Australia struggled against Zimbabwe's spin attack to set a lowly target of 195 and had to rely on their bowlers to pick up the slack in the second innings.
Captain Jaron Morgan said his side did well to restrict Zimbabwe's batsman but were at least 40 runs short of a victory.
"Building partnerships is a massive thing for us at the moment," said Morgan, who posted a 54-run partnership with South Australia batsman Kelvin Smith.
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"I think our big partnerships have been around 60 in the last four games we've played. If we want to win games, we need to build bigger partnerships and that will lead to bigger scores."
Australian Test great and national talent manager Greg Chappell was hopeful the team would bounce back for their second and final warm-up game against Pakistan in Dubai on Wednesday, before the tournament begins on the weekend.
"The only way you learn is to make mistakes and hopefully get better," Chappell said.
"We've made a few mistakes and that's a good sign that we see some of the guys learning from that."
