RCB should thank WICB for unleashing ‘Frankenstein’ Gayle on rival bowlers!
RCB should thank WICB for unleashing Gayle
By Madan Mohan
I must admit upfront that I am not the biggest fan of Chris Gayle and feel he is highly overrated. Yes, he can be brutality personified on his day, but those days have tended to be too few and far between to pose a serious threat to the opposition.
Except, that is, in this IPL where he has fired in all but one innings (at the time of writing). It has taken me completely by surprise, to say the very least. But I really shouldn’t have been. Hell hath no fury like a stung West Indian player, and Chris Gayle is no exception.
Before Clive Lloyd commenced his illustrious reign as West Indian captain, the team produced great players but was perceived as a bunch of happy-go-lucky gentle giants. It’s not the Calypso way to dig deep and gnash teeth in the heat of competition all the time. They enjoyed the very act of playing the game too much to care so much about winning or losing.
All that changed when a new generation of players took over the mantle. Stung by racism, they decided to make everybody shut up and do it the best possible way. For more than a decade thereafter, cricket watchers would look on awestruck at an era of unprecedented – and arguably unsurpassed – domination. Lloyd’s generation had a point to prove and they were playing for a cause, not for the heck of it. West Indies could not be beaten during this time.
We know how that story came to a tragic end. Not an end, really, because they seem to be in a freefall, going from bad to worse. Nevertheless, belligerence has time and again woken up the sleeping giant, leaving opposing teams at the mercy of its wrath. In the second Test of the Frank Worrell Trophy of 1995, Curtly Ambrose returned a lone wicket and captain Richie Richardson wondered aloud if he should be rested for the next Test. He roared back with nine wickets in the next and West Indies defeated Australia by nine wickets.
A little more recently, in the 2006 India-West Indies ODI series played in the Caribbean, West Indies lost the first encounter and the Indian coach Greg Chappell (in)famously observed that the once great West Indies team had forgotten how to win. Thereafter, West Indies won every subsequent match of the five match series and thanked Chappell for spurring them on.
It seems that insult or humiliation is what transforms the Calypso beat from a languid dance to a ruthless victory march. And so it is that Gayle, hurt at being left out of the national squad, joined the IPL and metamorphosed from cavalier slogger to one-man demolition squad. In five innings, he has smashed two centuries and, amazingly, broken into the 10 highest run scorers of this edition of the IPL! Along the way, he has also posted the most runs scored so far in an IPL over – 37. That’s going to be hard to displace!
The best part is he is not done yet and should Royal Challengers Bangalore go all the way, they would heartily thank the West Indies Cricket Board for unleashing the proverbial Frankenstein on rival bowlers. To watch the Calypso way in full flow is one of the best sights in cricket and IPL 4 could not have asked for a better advertisement than the full onslaught of the Gayle force.
(Madan Mohan, a 25-year old CA from Mumbai, is passionate about writing, music and cricket. Writing on cricket is like the icing on the cake.)