Is it at all possible that Chris Gayle is being just a tiny bit thin-skinned here? Maybe he’s secretly worried that Curtly Ambrose has a point.

Curtly Ambrose isn’t sure Chris Gayle should automatically get a place in the West Indies’ first choice XI at the T20 World Cup.

This seems a not unreasonable suggestion. The West Indies have a fair few accomplished and destructive T20 batters and Gayle has been in no kind of form whatsoever.

You can’t expect to make these kinds of comments about Gayle without some sort of response though.

To provide some context, Gayle has made one fifty in 16 T20 internationals this year and averaged 17.46. He also averaged 18.33 across nine matches in the CPL before making 1 and 14 in his two recent appearances at the IPL.

Gayle is the best T20 batter there’s been, so you wouldn’t rule out a turnaround and in fact Ambrose conceded as much, saying, “he can still be destructive.”

The issue for Gayle is that Ambrose also said that he, “hasn’t done much in the last 18 months to convince me that he will set the World Cup alight. For me, Gayle is definitely not an automatic choice for starting. When you look at his exploits over the last 18 months, he has struggled not only for the West Indies, but other T20 franchises.”

Gayle’s response?

“I can tell you personally – and you can let him know – that Chris Gayle, the Universe Boss, have no respect for Curtly Ambrose whatsoever. I am finished with Curtly Ambrose.”

That’s an actual quote.

The comments came on The Island Tea Morning Show, where he then revealed some sort of fundamental internal confusion between ‘support for Chris Gayle’ and ‘support for the West Indies’.

“I have no respect,” he said. “Any time I see him I will tell him as well: ‘Stop being negative. Support the team ahead of the World Cup.’ This team has been selected and we need past players to support us. We need that. We don’t need negative energy. In other teams, their past players support their teams, why can’t our own support us in a big tournament like this?”

Ambrose might argue that he is supporting the team by championing other squad members. Maybe when you’re a 42-year-old international cricketer, comments like that feel more like attacks.

Concluding with the serene dignity afforded to only the very few, Gayle said that if former players continue to be negative and not support the team, then the, “Universe Boss is going to be disrespectful – disrespectful verbally in their face.”

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2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 34, India v West Indies

Chris Gayle stopped a Virat Kohli shot. He dived to stop it. Sort of. It was perhaps even more spectacular than that time he ran.

Think back to the family holidays of your childhood. With slightly too many people rammed into the back of a Vauxhall Cavalier, you would undertake two long, ultra-hot days of driving towards some remote corner of France. You would listen to Dire Straits. Maybe Fleetwood Mac. Maybe the Tall Stories Monster Munch tape.

Once you’d arrived at your destination, you would then spend 12 days in the pool.

As a child, this is what holidays are supposed to involve. You’re supposed to muck about in water. Adults would go in the pool too, but they were never there by default. Children are fish. Adults are land mammals. When an adult looked like they might be about to enter the pool, you always noticed.

Remember that big guy? Slow walker. With hindsight he’d probably had a bit of wine with his lunch. He ambles up to the side of the pool and lines his feet up at the edge. He’s going to get in. You’re watching.

There are three ways to get into a pool as an adult:

1. You lower yourself in gradually
2. You gallumph in, arse first
3. You dive in

Big guy goes for the dive.

Sometimes you get these people who do not look in the least bit athletic who can really swim. It’s latent swimming ability that they can tap into whenever they choose. Walking up a set of steps will get them out of breath, but with their body weight supported by the water, they’ll knock out 20 lengths of gliding, splashless front crawl no problem.

You can spot these people instantly. They always dive in and when they do so, they pierce the water like a dart.

Big guy is not one of those people.

Big guy just sort of keels over forwards and executes an arched-backed full body flop. Seen in a wholly different context, you’d do well to reach any conclusion other than “sniper victim”.

When the stars align and a cricket ball is about to pass him at exactly the right speed and exactly the right distance, that is exactly how Chris Gayle executes a diving stop.

Look, we know you’re not going to believe this, but we swear to you it’s true: Chris Gayle ran.

It was a bit back. It was during the first one-day international, but we figure it was a significant enough event as to still be newsworthy, which is why we’re reporting on it now.

First, a bit of background

Once upon a time, Chris Gayle ran semi-regularly. We don’t accurately remember this period, but we’re pretty sure it existed purely based on how much we’ve been struck by his more recent non-running.

Gayle was formerly a reluctant runner, but that reluctance has grown to the extent that he is now not so much a man as an obelisk in a purple hat.

The non-running is most noticeable when he bats. He walks his singles. Or, more accurately, he walks singles instead of running twos because he’d never actually risk leaving the crease for anything one might consider a single.

He’s often willing to walk singles for his batting partner’s twos as well, which is very big of him.

When West Indies are in the field, you will generally find Gayle in one of two locations: (1) standing at slip or short fine leg, or (2) lying down on the massage table back in the dressing room. (This is slightly unfair. He doesn’t actually skip fielding anywhere near as much as some others have done (nor as much as he probably should).)

Chris Gayle did not run when he was batting, nor did he run while he was lying down on the massage table back in the dressing room. Chris Gayle ran midway through a spell standing at short fine leg.

What on earth prompted this?

Jason Roy swept a ball and it went past Gayle. Crucially, no-one was behind Gayle, and equally crucially, it didn’t go so quickly that there was no point running after it.

Gayle turned and – we swear this is true – did maybe two strides of almost-running. He didn’t run quickly and he didn’t run for long, but he definitely definitely made some sort of effort to exceed walking pace.

It didn’t last long. Of course it didn’t last long. It was but a brief moment of hell between ‘Should I run for this?’ and ‘There’s no point running for this’ at which point he slowed down again. It might even have been as soon as the second stride when the deceleration began, but that deceleration was only possible because he had accelerated in the first place.

It was just a few frames of footage really, but we saw it; we saw it with our own eyes. It was unmistakeable: the exertion of force through at least one of his two legs in an attempt to move slightly more quickly.

It may never happen again, but Chris Gayle ran.

Chris Gayle has always played catch-up. A batsman with a capacity to score quicker than most, he has often taken the time to play himself in before engaging his core to spectator-peppering effect.

But just as his personality often seems to have descended into self-parody these days, so has his batting. The slow start has become slower and the catching up even more necessarily urgent.

People say that this is okay so long as he does catch up. But does he? In this match he hit 12 sixes and still only scored at a run a ball.

That’s no mean feat. Gayle hit 72 runs in sixes and still managed to score slower than Joe Root, who made a hundred in the very same match without clearing the boundary even once.

Gayle played out 64 dot balls in that innings of 135. Jason Roy’s hundred came off 65 balls.

People say that the risk with Gayle’s approach is that he wastes a load of deliveries playing himself in and then gets out – but there’s a point at which playing yourself in becomes inefficient no matter what happens next.

England, in contrast, start hitting early and keep on hitting throughout the innings. In a flat pitch how-many-runs-can-you-possibly-score situation, this gives them a crucial edge.

And if they’re chasing, they can actually ease off a bit later on – as you can see from this run-rate chart from Cricinfo.

As we’ve written before, sixes hit late in an innings can often bring the shadow of two more that weren’t hit earlier on.

Gayle hits a lot of mid-to-late innings sixes and we’d argue that this only really succeeds in better highlighting what he isn’t doing earlier on.

A 110-metre six is still only a six, while a dot ball is always a dot ball. Chris Gayle is not a very efficient batsman any more.

2 minute readNot so long ago, England were claiming that they had little regard for par scores any more. Henceforth, their only target was to be ‘as many as we can get’. Maybe this is still the case, but today’s batting against the West Indies seemed initially cautious to these sometimes blurry eyes.

We had in mind a rather worrying interview with Jason Roy we read last week, in which he said: “I’ve got to realise I need to give myself time – I’m not a robot.”

It seemed unfair on robots that they shouldn’t be permitted time, but that wasn’t what really concerned us. We were more worried about Roy spending any time at all playing himself in. Jason Roy may well need to give himself time, but that is almost exactly what England don’t need.

Roy’s job is to flail from the off, because Alex Hales can’t. If Roy eats up a dozen balls making a similar number of runs, that isn’t really good enough. It’s a fifth of the innings wasted, because Hales will more often than not be doing the same. Hales has earned the right do that. That’s his way. He is the big log England are looking to ignite. In this analogy, Jason Roy is basically just tinder.

That may seem dismissive, but the truth is that this is essentially England’s strategy. They have ten batsmen, only two or three of whom are special. The rest are disposable; fast-burning kindling. A to-hell-with-the-consequences approach at the top of the order is barely even a gamble because the only consequences are to the individual – the team can easily cope with his loss.

In contrast, Chris Gayle is the West Indies’ Hales. And then some.

Gayle is Alex Hales having played hundreds more international matches and twice as much T20. He is an Alex Hales who’s faced every T20 situation and played T20 in every ground. He is an Alex Hales shot-through with experience and shorn of doubt.

Gayle knew that 183 could be chased in Mumbai. All he had to do was go out and do it.

2 minute read

Where do you go for your right to reply these days? Instagram, apparently.

Chris Gayle made a 12-ball fifty in the Big Bash this week and as ever with sportsmen, you get the impression he thinks this proves his fundamental rightness about everything; like he could napalm an orphanage but it wouldn’t be wrong if he got crucial runs at a decent lick the following day.

He doesn’t say that explicitly, but that’s the vibe.

“My idol & the person who I look up to and also want to be like when growing up as a kid is in the picture” he begins – about a picture of himself. After that, he thanks a load of people, including ‘the haters’ – a term which pretty much always signposts unrepentant wrongdoing.

After bemoaning all the players who smiled in front of his face but didn’t publicly stand up for him (it’s because they didn’t really support you, Chris), it’s on to the people he doesn’t thank – principally Andrew Flintoff, Chris Rogers and Shane Watson, in that order.

“The past cricketer who say I make myself look like a chop, the other who claim I was no good to the youngsters while playing for the thunder, the next one who said he expect that sort of behavior from Chris – Y’all can kiss my ‘Black Rass'”

That counts as a slamming, right? We’ve always wanted to use ‘slams’ in a headline.

2 minute read

If you don’t already know, Chris Gayle’s unique selling point is that he likes women. That’s how he defines and sells himself. Quite how vacuous a person has to be before they decide upon a characteristic shared by 90-odd per cent of men as being somehow self-defining is beyond us.

To make it stick, Gayle goes all in. The latest example saw him attempting to chat up a female reporter during a live TV interview. He did it because HE REALLY LIKES WOMEN – NO, LIKE WAY MORE THAN YOU DO.

Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t interested.

It’s a fine line between stupid and clever

There’s a definite line between being ‘a character’ and just being sleazy and disrespectful. For example, when Gayle ignored the ramblings of old Etonian, former MCC president and ex-England manager, John Barclay, and asked him, “You get much pussy?” – that’s funny. It’s totally inappropriate, but there’s a certain power dynamic at play where above all it just seems mischievous or amusingly oblivious.

When a reporter asks you a direct question and you ignore what she’s saying to make a comment about her eyes, that’s different. That’s not mischievous. That’s undermining her and making it impossible for her to do her job. In this instance, Gayle is the megabucks sports star; one of the big names of the whole damn event. It’s a different dynamic.

A lot of people working in sport apparently don’t see the difference.

The furore

As much as this is about Chris Gayle and what he said, it’s probably more about the world that created him. Most people commenting on the issue have pointed out that he’s been swanning about behaving like a naughty 13-year-old for many years now and has not just been left unchecked, but has effectively been encouraged. Chris Rogers makes the point that Gayle’s laddish reputation has seen him put on a pedestal by the media.

We have the dubious pleasure of having to trawl through all of Gayle’s tweets once a fortnight as part of our Twitter round-up for Cricinfo. The thing that always strikes us the most is not so much how he relentlessly promotes himself as some sort of fun-loving ‘player,’ but that there’s always someone who finds him funny. He can say anything, literally anything – usually something totally straightforward about how he likes to party or how he likes women – and some retard will tweet him to tell him he’s ‘hilarious’.

We always assumed it was 12-year-old boys for whom English was a second language, but maybe it’s sportsmen and members of the media.

< 1 minute read

We’d say that Chris Gayle’s biggest achievement today was looking like a relatively small person. The route to achieving this wasn’t easy. He first had to hit a double hundred and this then allowed him the opportunity to stand next to Ian Bishop at the post-match press conference.

Bishop appears to have spent his time since retirement growing, such that he now looks like a bigger than life-size version of a human – all in proportion but built to completely the wrong scale. We’re desperately hoping that England get to play the Windies and that James Taylor puts in a match-winning performance.

Shortly after Gayle had exited the pop-up stage, Jason Holder made an appearance. Miraculously, he was taller than Bishop, but looking at his spindly physique, it was obvious what had happened: someone had stretched him.

Also today, Shane Warne used the phrase ‘absolutely salmon trout’ to mean ‘out’. Combine this with all his talk of cherries, poles and globes and it’s obvious that the man is somehow entirely unfamiliar with the language of cricket.

< 1 minute readThe worth of a Twenty20 player cannot be measured via a single innings. That’s a mistake many people make – they confuse aberrations with excellence. It’s therefore worth underlining the sheer inevitability that it would be Chris Gayle who would break the record for the highest individual score in the shortest format.

It doesn’t actually matter all that much that he was facing Ishwar Pandey, Ali Murtaza and even an over from Aaron Finch (although Luke Wright’s four overs for 26 look pretty fine in this context). Whoever was bowling, it takes phenomenal ability to hit 30 of the 66 balls you face for boundaries. As a child, we never once managed it when bowling a tennis ball to ourself via the wall of the garage and we were bowling underarm and umpiring as well.

Gayle finished with 175 not out, having hit 13 fours and 17 sixes in another good advert for his core strength. His team, Royal Challengers Bangalore, won. You may well have guessed that last bit.

2 minute read

It’s generally best to avoid writing about Chris Gayle, because he seems to draw admiration – and therefore blog comments – from the biggest dickheads on the planet.

It’s not that there’s nothing to admire about Gayle’s batting. It’s just that a rich seam of knobheadery sits alongside rational, justifiable appreciation. Don’t follow his Twitter feed, because he frequently answers questions from what can accurately be described as his fans. These people exhibit an unironic level of hero worship that we find really depressing. Maybe we’re just embittered because they appear to find his non-jokes funny. There’s little more dispiriting than idiocy that also devalues what you do.

But back to sport, John Hotten has written a nice summary of how and why Gayle is such a singular cricketer in the shortest format. In essence, he’s reliable, but he also has an unusual ability to hit sixes once he’s played himself in. We’ve always been struck by how hard Gayle hits the ball with such little effort and we reckon it’s all in the core.

It’s not in The Core – you’d be hard-pressed to get anything useful out of that. It’s in the totally uncool sets of muscles that span your midriff. Gayle is known for being built like a masonry khazi with big cannonball shoulders and biceps which for some reason are always described as ‘rippling’ as if they’re flobbling about rather than solid. But there are plenty of batsmen who are – in the parlance of our times – ‘ripped’ and who don’t seem to hit the ball in the same way.

When you hit a cricket ball, you do so using a whole host of muscles. Your legs and torso are the foundations for all that follows. They are what braces against the impact of ball on bat and if they do not give, you get a better return from your cover drive/aimless heave.

Watch Chris Gayle play a pull shot and the power comes from the body, not from the arms. The strength’s not just about producing power, it’s also about producing controlled power. He can swing within himself and still clear the nearest sea.

The moral of the story is this: for all the apparent vanity of the man, he must also spend a lot of time developing practical strength and pragmatism is a quality even non-dickheads can admire.