West Indies

Chris Gayle to play Twenty20 for someone

In a not-entirely-surprising move, Chris Gayle has signed to play for Somerset in next season’s Twenty20 Cup.

Gayle’s ‘people’ released a statement quoting him as saying:

“I’m delighted to be heading to [insert name of cricket team]. Hopefully I can make a key contribution to their T20 campaign this year.”

Somerset’s director of cricket, Brian Rose, said that Gayle would get into any world T20 XI.

Low-level cricket media nonentity, King Cricket, said that Gayle would only play for a world XI if he was happy with the pay. Otherwise he’d be playing for a Groningen XI that weekend in the Netherlands Super Twenty20 Cup of Superness, because they’d put together a very competitive financial package.

India lose home one-day international – West Indies win away

Which is the more noteworthy? Not sure. Not sure it matters. Both facts are pretty striking.

West Indies

West Indies’ tour of the subcontinent, while on the face of it relatively unsuccessful, has been fairly decent in our eyes. It’s a bit sad that expectations have dropped that much, but let’s face it, they have. There’s promise in this side and not the dumb, blind optimism kind of promise either, but real, gritty actually-going-to-make-some-effort promise.

When the Windies last toured England, their captain turned up about four minutes before the first Test. It wasn’t his fault his team were playing an away series in England in May, against opposition they’d finished playing a home series against about a week before, but it still didn’t set much of an example. His side promptly went through the motions in cold weather, in front of few fans and the series never captured the attention, let alone the imagination.

This summer, West Indies again arrive in England in May. We feel faint confidence that they’ll have more stomach for a fight.

India

Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir and Suresh Raina have mustered 69 runs between them in nine innings in this series. Our verdict on this is as follows: three good one-day players haven’t played very well.

Great draw – in no other sport does that make much sense

It was a glorious and gleefully shambolic finish to the third Test between India and West Indies. West Indies were one wicket away from a tie, India one run away from a win. R Ashwin was run out going for what would have been the winning run and the match ended in a draw – but the Windies had chances in those closing overs too.

Our initial thought was that it would be boring if we repeated ourself about how a close Test match is generally superior to a close one-day or Twenty20 match. But then we thought, no, to hell with you. We’re incredibly boring in real life and we repeat ourself constantly. It’s our website and if we want to be as repetitive as the snatch of music on a DVD title menu, that’s our decision.

The closing overs of a Test match that’s in the balance

As a child, we loved Lego. We would spend five hours making an elaborate Lego spaceship the like of which had never been seen before. Sometimes, in attempting to secure an awkward piece towards the end of the construction process, we would inadvertently explode the whole damn thing. When this happened, we would make a sound.

The sound started low and quiet, slowly rose in both pitch and volume and culminated in an angry shriek. It was pretty foul. Anyone who heard that sound would have instantly known the emotion behind it. It was borne of the profound frustration you can only feel when you’ve spent bloody ages on something and then made a balls of it at the end.

Where are you going with this?

If there was Lego crumblage in the first few minutes of construction, we didn’t make the sound. Quite simply, you have to have invested time and effort in something in order to feel that level of emotion.

It doesn’t have to be a negative emotion. You’ll generally feel more pride over something you’ve slaved over than something you knocked up in five minutes.

The point is that having made an investment, you care more about the outcome. That is why a close Test match finish feels so electrifying to those who have followed proceedings from day one.

West Indies have some batsmen

There’s a danger of being too bloody sneering about high scores these days. We know we’re as guilty of this as anyone. It’s all too easy to blame the pitch, as if the humans standing on top of it play no part.

The Windies have batted like spanners for years, so it’s encouraging to see them keep India in the field for two full days of Test cricket, no matter what the conditions. Darren Bravo, in particular, has seemed pleasingly averse to shit-shot-seppuku and a few others, such as Kirk Edwards, have followed his lead. It’s all well and good playing with ‘Caribbean flair’, but quite often it’s actually a lot smarter to keep the ball on the deck.

West Indies cricket is fractious enough that this will probably all unravel in an acrimonious contract dispute, but for now there’s just a little bit of solidity about this team and we welcome it.

Carlton Baugh and the importance of wicketkeepers

When did Ks become cooler than Cs. We blame Kris Kross, even though they aren’t closely associated with ‘cool’ ordinarily.

Yesterday, Kraigg Brathwaite (an extra G and a missing I as well as that K) got a lot of the attention. Today, a man with a more authentically West Indian name has had the biggest influence. Stand up, Carlton Baugh. Stand up to the stumps.

We all pay a lot of attention to bowling figures, yet wicketkeepers don’t seem to get much credit. That’s how we end up with so many pan-handed buffoons behind the sticks, because it’s easier to assign value to runs scored.

Evaluating a keeper

It’s hard to rate keepers, because it’s not so much about what they do as how consistently they do it. We can all spot the crap ones, but who watches a keeper closely enough for an entire cricket match that they can pick out the great from the good?

That said, they can catch the eye from time to time. Carlton Baugh caught R Ashwin down the leg side today, but it was his stumping of Sehwag that was most striking and most influential.

Sehwag went back in his crease to work a ball to leg, missed it and somehow got stumped when his right foot became airborne for a fraction of a second. This was significant in two ways.

Firstly, and most immediately, Sehwag was on 55 off 46 balls. It changed the match such that India then slumped to 154-7. Secondly, any batsman who takes guard with Carlton Baugh standing behind him from now on will be rather more aware of his back leg than he should be. Never mind coming down the pitch, they’ll have to concentrate on precisely how they stay in their crease as well.

It was a devious, sly dog of a dismissal and we’ll bet it’s exactly the kind that wicketkeepers pride themselves on. So well played Carlton and thanks for spurning Ks as well – although Indians might find a different C comes to mind when they think of you.

West Indian cricketer name generator

We have devised a simple method for generating the name that someone would have were they a West Indian cricketer. After extensive testing (two people) we felt it stood up to scrutiny and we were about to ‘go public’ when we asked a third person.

Using our methodology, his West Indian cricketer name quite genuinely came out as “George Headley” and that pretty much sealed it for us.

So, to find out your West Indian cricketer name, simply take your mother’s maiden name and add the town of your birth. That’s it.

Our name, were we a West Indian cricketer, would be Harris Crewe and our workmate’s would be Duffy Solihull. We can easily imagine that pair opening the bowling. However, we admit this method probably won’t work so well if you were born outside the UK. Sorry about that. But try it anyway.

Kieron Pollard is overrated and we feel a bit sorry for him

Kieron Pollard made a golden duck today as West Indies were rolled for 61 by Bangladesh. Pollard’s failure isn’t all that surprising, because his record is actually pretty piss-poor.

Kieron Pollard’s record

Pollard is best-known for his clumping hitting, yet he averages 21.67 in one-day internationals and 12.66 in Twenty20 internationals. That’s shit.

His reputation is built solely on his performances in domestic Twenty20. Or, more accurately, it is built on just a handful of performances in domestic Twenty20, chiefly the 10 fifties he’s hit in his 106 innings and the 146 sixes that he has launched.

This is how he has come to be a ‘big name’ and the truth is most of us know that. Yes, that’s right, most of us know that he’s overrated, even though that would appear to be a paradox.

One eye-catching dimension

We feel a little sorry for Pollard. He’s kind of a symbol. He’s the definitive overvalued mediocre slogger. He’s a one-dimensional cricketer whose one dimension just happens to be the most eye-catching dimension there is.

He’s probably well aware of his limitations, but he’s not going to turn down stacks of cash because he disagrees with someone else’s assessment of his worth. Few people would do that and despite what some of you will say, high denomination paper money probably won’t staunch his tears when he reads photo captions like the one we’ve just written.

Really, he shouldn’t attract such criticism, because without today’s simplistic marketing we’d barely have heard of him.

Bangladesh v West Indies – no-one will get credit for a win

When a losing team plays another losing team, one of them has to lose. No-one wins.

This is good though. It’s like life. Life is an ongoing damage limitation exercise that is ultimately doomed to failure. You try your best, you slave away, you constantly improve yourself and the best you can hope for is that you won’t be ridiculed for how badly you have failed.

If the West Indies win, it is ‘only Bangladesh’. If Bangladesh win, it is because of the slow implosion of Caribbean cricket. The important thing is that when it’s all over, no-one is particularly happy.

Devendra Bishoo is a canny leg-spinner

We thought this when we saw him bowl during the World Cup. Devendra Bishoo is one of a fair few promising West Indies bowlers knocking about at the minute.

The problem is, it’s a challenge for these bowlers to retain enthusiasm when the batsmen only ever give them 200 to bowl at. The West Indies haven’t found a proper batsman since Chris Gayle and that’s a really long time when you consider that he’s passed through being a captain and is now in a phase where the West Indies Cricket Board imply that he’s a knobhead. This generally only happens when you’re starting to get on a bit.

Fortunately for the West Indies, they’re currently playing a Test against Pakistan, a nation with an even greater aversion to run scoring. Devendra Bishoo’s 4-68 helped give the Windies a 66-run lead, even though they only scored 226 themselves.

The Windies top order have attempted to fritter away that advantage in the second innings, but Shivnarine Chanderpaul is still to come. At 36, you’d think he’d be sick of this by now.

“How have you idiots not learned anything from me in the last decade?” he might reasonably ask. “Do you suffer from all three major forms of retardation?”

Out with the old Windies players

The West Indies have dropped Chris Gayle, Ramnaresh Sarwan and Shivnarine Chanderpaul for the first two of five one-day internationals against Pakistan.

Whether this is actually a strong move, we don’t yet know. It depends whether any of them return. The Windies’ coach, Ottis Gibson, has had fairly transparent opinions about these players though. He thinks they don’t really give a shit, which may well be true.

Chanderpaul is pretty old now, so dropping him from the one-day side does make sense. Ramnaresh Sarwan was dropped for a while as an up-the-arse kick, but the anus pain only seemed to spur him to continued mediocrity.

Gayle’s a bit different. He is far and away the most intimidating West Indian batsman and while he certainly appears like he doesn’t give a shit, we’re reluctant to judge, because we know better than anyone that ‘appearing to not give a shit’ and ‘not giving a shit’ are entirely different things.

There’s some interesting stuff about Gayle at WICB Exposé, a site which is fairly self-explanatory if you look at the various categories it boasts: Abuse of Power, Nepotism, Mismanagement, Hypocrisy, Financial Erosion, Dirty Tricks and good, plain old-fashioned Corruption.

As a hilarious footnote to this, we found WICB Exposé by following a link from Lalit Modi’s Twitter account.