There seem to be two reasons why Chris Gayle turned in the innings of his life in this test.
The first one seems to be anger. Just because he wears shades all the time and smiles alot doesn’t mean Gayle can’t get angry.
From time to time he looks fucken filthy, and perhaps, just perhaps, being told he was in charge of a team that was the worst thing to happen to test cricket since the front foot no ball rule fired him up. On the eve of day one he apparently gave a testicle swinging speech to his men, and they sure played well on day one.
The other seems to be the Adelaide pitch. Having used all his “a” material in his match eve speech, on day four he used his bat. But he couldn’t smite and slog, as the pitch would not allow him. So he seemed to mature mild innings, and he got the sort of results you’d expect from the wing commander Strauss.
Not that he usually seems to care about the surface when he is hitting away, but perhaps he sensed that he was the only one who would be able to score there, and he would do that better if he wasn’t out.
Australia kept waiting for the old Gayle to come out, and they had plenty of men on the boundary waiting for the catch. Instead he just pushed the ball around, put away the bad balls and made sure he was there at the end.
No other West Indies batsmen could get past 27, making his 165 look like Yao Ming in China.
With the way he bats Gayle has created a shitty situation for himself. When he goes out hitting, people say he is reckless, when he tries to push the ball around and gets out they tell him to trust his natural instincts.
As captain, he can’t really win, so choosing to bat in a way so alien from his slap happy days was risky.
It could have been reviewed like people reviewed Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl. The press would have said while Smith’s intentions were good; the film lacked a sense of Kevin Smithness to it. We’re is the pop culture smut. Or, in this case, the raw aggression and macho hitting. It is easy to be typecast and pigeon holed, and it takes something special to break free.
This was special and Gayle pulled it off. It must have been like an outer body experience for him, looking down on himself saying, “who is this motherfucker scoring all these fucken singles?”
He also probably owes Chanderpaul money, for infringing on his trademark Windies innings.
An innings of that class probably deserved better than a draw.
I think of my book as Mallrats.
