clive lloyd

West Indies Cricket: The Curious Case of Christopher Henry Gayle

The curious case of Christopher Henry Gayle grows stranger by the day.

Here is a man who has two Test triple hundreds under his belt; his ability to scorch opposition bowlers with his big hitting has the best demoralised and he continues to take the  West Indian domestic league, Regional Super 50, by storm.

Middlesex are yet another team that seeks to have the buccaneer in their midst.Gayle is perhaps the most successful free agent in the cricketing realm.

Following the exit of Brian Charles Lara, Gayle dons the mantle of ‘Entertainer’ with typical Calypso swagger . However, he has no place in the current West Indian scheme of things.

His running feud with the West Indian Cricket Board is well-documented. The West Indian Players Association (WIPA) rallied to his defence but to no avail.

Gayle rubbed the high-and-mighty in the corridors of power the wrong way with his damning indictment of their high-handed ways. His displacement from the national side following disagreements with Dr. Ernest Hilaire of the WICB forced him to cast aside the kid gloves and  slam the board’s idiosyncratic ways.

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Mahendra Singh Dhoni going the Kapil way?

Kapil Dev Nikhanj. Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

Two charismatic skippers with winning ways.

The former led Team India to an epochal triumph in the 1983 World Cup, a victory which led to a radical power shift within the ICC. The Reliance World Cup followed in 1987. The circle was complete. The colonised were now king-makers.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni was fortunate to be selected skipper for the inaugural 2007 T20 World Cup. He  thrust a young, inexperienced team to the pinnacle in a format ignored by the bigger guns—Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble and Saurav Ganguly.

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