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sk them who makes them laugh,” Chris Gayle answered when asked about his poker-faced demeanour which infuriates so many.
If the smile pacifies, then Gayle intimidates, and that’s the rub. A smile – especially on the face of a West Indies cricket captain – makes people feel comfortable. But Gayle doesn’t afford that luxury. “I am a very moody person,” he acknowledged to Michelle McDonald in a March 2004 interview. He sees his responsibility as instilling a can-do mentality in fellow players and in leading them.
To lead, there must be those willing to follow. And from what the current crop of West Indies players have been saying, followers, he has quite a few.
“There is [under Gayle], certainly a more relaxed atmosphere in the team, which also works in favour of the cricket we play,” said Shrivnarine Chanderpaul, with 14 years in international cricket, the team’s senior player and himself once captain.
As to Gayle’s openness, Chanderpaul added: “You know you can take the liberty to talk to him. He will listen and try and find a solution, and this is something the players appreciate.”
The fast bowler Daren Powell had similar praise for his fellow Jamaican last year after the West Indies defeated England in the one-day series in England: “To me, the whole team has changed since the day he (Gayle) took over.”
This support from within had the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) scratching its head, because it has always taken a top-down-take-it-or-leave-it approach when appointing a captain. Scarcely have the opinions of players counted for much.
The most striking example of this was last year before that same ODI series in England when, if their wishes had gone unchecked, the board would have foisted Daren Ganga – a player who was not even selected in the original squad of 30 for the World Cup a few months earlier – on the team as captain.
It took the threat of a resignation en masse from the West Indies selectors, who had recommended Gayle for the post in the absence of the injured Ramnaresh Sarwan, for the board to beat a hasty retreat.
There was no such open conflict for the 2008 Digicel Series against Sri Lanka although confirmation that Gayle would be captain came only two weeks before the first Test.
I’m glad it’s over with now,” a relieved Gayle commented, observing that there had been too much unhelpful speculation over whether it would be him or Sarwan.
But who is this Chris Gayle anyways, and why is he causing such a stir?
Before he took over from Sarwan, his mouthpiece was his bat. Very few in West Indies cricket circles had any inkling as to his leadership potential. His uncommunicative style and run-ins with the WICB – some not of his own making - did nothing for his cause. But little did most know that this tall, relaxed Jamaican was building relationships with his team-mates, the sort that matter.
He got off on the wrong foot with officialdom on his first senior tour to England in 2000 when then team manager Ricky Skerritt singled him out as having “an attitudinal problem”. Probably for that, he was omitted from the Champions Trophy which followed and sent instead to the
Australian Cricket Academy in Adelaide to refine his skills and, hopefully, to mend his ways.
In April 2003, after 24 consecutive Tests, he was again omitted from the first two matches of the home series against Australia because he opted to play in the lucrative, inaugural double-wicket competition in St. Lucia – a competition sanctioned by both the International Cricket Council (ICC) and the WICB itself.
The following March, Gayle, along with Sarwan, Adam Sanford, and Tino Best, were back in hot water after they wandered over to the Mound Party Stand to presumably drown their sorrows, after the West Indies had been routed for 47, their lowest Test score, by England at Sabina Park.
Naïve to the fallout, the four probably thought that it was better to drink some local brew rather than cry over spilt milk. But, to the Caribbean people, it reinforced the perception that modern-day West Indies players didn’t give a hoot about their performance.
That November, Gayle was among 16 players involved in a long-running row with the WICB over conflicting personal endorsements from direct competitors of the cellular telephone giant Digicel, which had just signed a multimillion dollar deal to sponsor the team.
That brouhaha came a mere two months after the triumph over England in a thrilling Champions Trophy final at the Oval. It would have scuppered the West Indies’ participation in the triangular VB Series in Australia early in 2005 had it not been for the intervention of Caricom governments. But it resurfaced again on the team’s return for a home series against South Africa.
Gayle was among those axed from the first Test because the WICB again deemed that the existing contract he and others had with a rival sponsor was jeopardizing its deal with Digicel.
The issue prompted Brian Lara to resign as captain in solidarity with Gayle and the others who were disqualified (Sarwan, Dwayne Bravo, Fidel Edwards. Ravi Rampaul and Dwayne Smith).
By the next Test, an accommodation had been reached and Gayle was back at the top of the order. Within weeks he was joining the small band of batsmen who have amassed a Test triple hundred, compiling 317 against South Africa to add another batting record to add to the Antigua Recreation Ground’s long list.
It remains his highest score but hardly his most memorable as seven other batsmen gathered hundreds (another record) and only 17 wickets fell for 1,462 runs on the bowlers’ graveyard that was the ARG. Countless other innings more accurately define his reputation as one of the most devastating hitters of his time. South Africa have suffered the most at his hands.
Not fully recovered from a strained muscle, he belted their attack for the ninth fastest Test
hundred, off 78 balls, at Cape Town in 2004 at the start of a purple patch that continued with 107 in the next Test in Centurion and culminated with an unbeaten, run-a-ball 153 in the last ODI in Johannesburg. His unbeaten 133 at Jaipur put them out of the semi-final of the ICC Champions Trophy in 2006, his third hundred in the tournament that earned him the Man of the Series award.
“He’s a throwback to a time when West Indies dominated cricket,” wrote Cricinfo’s Anand Vasu.
But Gayle’s most spectacular blitz, 117 off 57 balls with 10 sixes and seven fours, came in the opening match of the inaugural ICC Twenty20 International tournament. It was also off the South Africans in Johannesburg and, if the West Indies somehow contrived to lose the match, his awesome display (“Gayle Force” was the predictable headline in more than one newspaper) set the tone for the excitement that followed.
Such destruction (he has hit 38 sixes in his 70 Tests, 8 in 173 ODIs) is counter-balanced by an
inconsistency that has kept his averages in both forms covering below 40. A ratio of seven Test hundreds (his 17 was his last, 20 matches back) is frustratingly low.
His leaden-footed, stand-and-deliver technique, critically and repeatedly analysed from press and commentary boxes, is an obvious reason but, for all that, he remains, since Brian Lara’s retirement, the West Indian feared most by the world’s bowlers.
And his booming bat isn’t the only thing that has drawn attention. Steve Waugh, the former Australian captain, noticed something else. On their 2005 tour of Australia, he singled out Gayle as the one player who could get the West Indies players out of their torpor.
“The highly talented Chris Gayle has the presence and ability to influence those around him,” the sharp-eyed Waugh wrote. “And by handing in his membership in the casual cool club, he will ensure a mass exodus that will go a long way to fulfilling his natural talent and that of others in the side.”
The selectors clearly took notice. With captain Sarwan injured and vice-captain Ganga unsuited to the lmited-overs stuff, they turned to Gayle to lead the team in the two Twenty20s and three ODIs at the end of last year’s tour of England.
The WICB initially vetoed the recommendation before reluctantly back-tracking. Immediately Gayle got himself into worries by commenting on the mush the board made of getting replacement players to England in time for the warm-up matches.
I think it’s disappointing that we are struggling to find eleven players to turn out,” Gayle wrote after management had to summon West Indian players from the English leagues to fill the gap.
Ken Gordon, then WICB president, promptly issued a strongly-worded statement, censuring Gayle and demanding an apology. Gayle bluntly refused and a potentially explosive situation was defused when the West Indies shared the Twenty20s and won the ODIs 2-1 and when Gordon was replaced by Julian Hunte. The transformation under Gayle did not escape the veteran correspondent Tony Cozier: “The energy and enthusiasm under Gayle were in conspicuous contrast to the lacklustre embarrassment of the four Tests.”
Whether this up-tick was a result of the players rallying around their captain in the face of a vindictive board, only Will Luke of Cricinfo was prepared to say: “His spat with the board has reinvigorated his side.”
Certainly the side seemed “reinvigorated” when Gayle once more took over for the tour of Zimbabwe and South Africa after the ill-fated Sarwan was eliminated by is fourth injury inside a year.
A hamstring torn in the second ODI in Zimbabwe left Gayle in doubt for the first Test in South Africa but, after a needless jog on the outfield just before play, the captain chose to risk it all the same.
The toss went South Africa’s way, Graeme Smith took the predictable option of bowling on a pitch of unknown quality following four days of rain – and Gayle immediately reclaimed the initiative with a deliberate attack that yielded 66 from 49 balls with 3 fours.
He had thrown down the gauntlet and his players responded with rare confidence and enthusiasm to win by 139 runs, the West Indies’ first victory in 10 Tests in South Africa. Gayle further damaged his hamstring on the first day of the second Test and sustained a broken thumb on the fourth, the first in a spate of injuries that ground the West Indies down.
What promised to be a close, competitive series gradually evolved into the rout so familiar to the West Indies away from home.
They were beaten in their next nine matches, the two remaining Tests, the second Twenty20 and all five ODIs. Gayle could only watch from back in Jamaica and wonder what might have been. Others wondered what might be for the captaincy.
“In my opinion, if I was a selector, the captain would be Chris Gayle,” was Michael Holding’s view, a sentiment supported by Fazeer Mohammed who covered the South African tour for CMC radio and news agency.
“Just send out the press release and spare us of the mama guile lyrics,” he wrote in the Trinidad & Tobago Express.
But not everyone was convinced.
The jury is still out at this stage,” said Sir Vivian Richards. Richie Richardson went further: “Sarwan is my man. He has the demeanour, the approach and I think he commands respect.”
For Chris Gayle, such fuss is par for the course.
RAY FORD, a KC Old Boy and resident of the United States,has written on West Indies cricket for newspapers and magazines for the past 30 years.
