Cool Chris and Bad Bas

An average of 99 - there's only one adjective for that, isn't there? But Bradman-esque is never going to work for Chris Gayle. The Don wouldn't have sat at home watching him cream 39 off an over and said, 'yes, of all modern players, Chris Gayle is the one who reminds me most of myself,' not least because he probably wouldn't have liked the idea of the IPL very much.

But there is an adjective that fits for Chris, and it's Richards-esque - not Viv, but Barry. When Bad Bas was in his pomp, his aptitude for casual, off the cuff carnage was the equivalent of Gayle's. He made 325 in a day, for example, against a West Australia attack that featured DK Lillee, and a former-pro once told me the story of a bowler who displeased the great man by dismissing him in front of his parents, who had flown in to watch him bat. Richards told him in words of few syllables that he would be humiliating him in the second innings, and he did, almost cruelly. Richards was perceived, much like Gayle, as a mercenary who turned it on when he felt like it.

And Richards, like Gayle, possessed another, less definable quality, in that there was something extra about the way he struck the ball. In Richards' case, it was the way the ball seemed to gather pace as it went towards the boundary, or how it hung in the air as it cleared it. Gayle too has this. Lots of players hit the ball hard and a long way, but not like he does. Virat Kohli said today that he had 'the best and most dangerous' seat in the house to watch him. Dilshan admitted he was scared by the power with which Gayle strikes it.

Richards was better than Gayle, so Chris can be pleased with his adjective. Richards-esque it is. Famously, Bad Bas once turned his bat sideways during an exhibition match and made fifty using the edge in the days when the edge was the width of a slim volume of poetry. With the edge on Chris Gayle's bat he'd have made a double hundred.

Chris Gayle Flicks The Switch

Power is an odd thing in batting. It's not absolutely necessary, or at least for a century and a half it wasn't. There's a great story about Geoffrey Boycott berating his batmaker because he'd been offered a gun bat 'that will really fly Geoffrey'. 'I don't want it to bloody fly,' the great man retorted. 'I want it to roll to the boundary. I still only get four for it'.

This is true of course, yet there is visceral shock to how hard the ball can be hit that has a psychological element to it. It's about dominance, even fear. I first experienced it in the nets at Alf Gover's as a young kid when Carlisle Best turned up. The ball came off his bat like a shell. Monty Lynch used to practice there often, and he could really lace it.

Currency has changed now, of course. You can talk about bat technology, shorter boundaries, the IPL, money, and you'd be right, but the real revolution is in the heads of the players. The culture has shifted, the sense of what's possible has moved. Hitting a long ball is now coached as legitimately as the forward defensive. It's in the mindset now.

There are lots of players who hit it miles. There are fewer who repeat the skill over and over. And then there's Chris Gayle. People hit the ball further than Gayle, but no-one hits it harder. Gayle doesn't go for distance, he goes for trajectory - flat and lethally powerful. His technique, with legs wideset, means that he will almost always carve square or hit straight, and he does so with fearsome velocity.

Yet what's more remarkable about it is its apparent randomness. Against England the other day, there was no logic to his onslaught - in fact it seemed to inject a mania into the West Indies chase that soon converted into desperation. They only needed 240-odd after all. But it's Chris Gayle's nature. He is a man at the mercy of his muse. When it happens, it happens. Very rarely in Test cricket he has subdued it and dug in for a hundred. The rest of the time, he surfs his own wave, a man apart.

He's inspiring and frustrating, comatose in the field and then savagely alive when he bats. He's sponsored by an obscure Pakistan-based batmaker when you would imagine that every major manufacturer in the world yearns for him to carry their stickers, because there's something about the way he hits the ball that is unique. It's like a Tyson punch, in that it looks the same as lots of other punches, but carries a force that comes from somewhere beyond. When Gayle flicks the switch, without rhyme or reason or warning, the ball travels with more intensity than it ever has before.

Sleeping with the Chrises

Chris Gayle says he wants to be West Indies captain. But Chris Gayle's hair says something different. Chris Gayle's hair says he wants to be a free man again. He's ditched the sensible 'do and reached for the cornrows. The rebellion has moved from the press interview to the top of his head.

Chris says he was misquoted in said press. But Chris Gayle's hair says Chris spoke the truth. The empty seats at the Riverside tell a similar story. Those nebulous 'authorities' need to listen up to the hair and the seats, if not Chris's interview. 

'Don't sleep with Chris on your mind' was one of the man's more memorable pronouncements. So stay out of his face and take note of the hair. If you're killing the joy in Chris, you're killing some of the joy in the game. 

Champagne super-over

The Guardian ran Andy Bull's piece with Harold Pinter today, an interview that turned out to be Pinter's last. The great playwright was talking about his lifelong love of the game. 'Drama happens in big cricket matches,' he said, 'but also in small cricket matches'. 

He was talking about 'big' and 'small' in terms of pro and amateur, but the dramas that appealed to his gimlet eye were the ones that came along ball by ball, with their capacity to provoke instant and overwhelming emotion. 

Dramas don't get much shorter than the super-over shoot-out between West Indies and New Zealand, an event Pinter didn't quite live to see but most probably would have been stirred by. It was the game squeezed down to its smallest unit, a reduction that should have been absurd, but that turned out to be glorious.

Chris Gayle hit Daniel Vettori, who had match figures of 4-0-16-3, for 25. By any measure it was superlative batting, not a contraction of the game but an expansion of it, an expression of what's possible. 

The Stanford Non-Prison Experiment (i)

A fuller reflection on the weekend in Antigua once the Batsman has a tour of the papers tomorrow, but a couple of thoughts that might otherwise get trampled in the stampede:

i) Ravishing Rudi Koertzen referred a good-looking leg before shout from Steve Harmison to Steve Davis, the TV umpire. Davis checked it wasn't a no ball and then used the pitch tracker to establish that the ball landed marginally outside Chris Gayle's leg stump. It took about 35 seconds. The world did not end. 

ii) Stanford has essentially used his money to bypass the West Indies Cricket Board and set up his own team. They showed more unity than the real West Indies team has in two decades. Supposing an equally rich fella came along and sidelined the ECB? 

iii) There have been many late night pavilion discussions on who you might choose to bat for your life, if you had to. On Saturday night, it turned out, Chris Gayle was batting for his brother's. Gayle's $1m will pay for heart treatment. Cavalier Chris is not often top of any list of this kind, but as he said afterwards, 'my back is broad'. It was, it was.