One-ton colossus: Chris Gayle makes molehill out of run-mountain

READ: Chris Gayle sets Twitter on fire with quick-fire 100

In one over, Chris Jordan bowled two perfect yorkers and Gayle dug them out. But on the third, he missed the length by not more than half-an-inch, and he was thumped back down the ground for four. Later in his innings, Moeen Ali pegged him back off the first three deliveries. Gayle pushed two of them back while the third drifted down for leg-byes. Then Ali got adventurous, only slightly. He gave it some air, a tactic for which a spinner cannot be held guilty.

For Gayle, though, that little bit of flight was like a red rag to a bull. And he came charging. That delivery and the subsequent couple flew over long-on into various sections of Wankhede’s North Stand.

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Cricket is supposed to be a sport of uncertainties, where batsmen and bowlers make mistakes and on occasions get away with it. But somehow that logic just doesn’t seem to hold true when Gayle is wielding the willow. Cricket and life get likened a lot. At least, we can be thankful that nothing in life mirrors or compares with the unforgiving challenge of bowling to Gayle.

On a different plane

We often hear batsmen and coaches talk about pacing innings and setting the tone. But Gayle operates at his own inimitable tempo. He is either on neutral or on jet stream. One minute he’s waddling around in his backyard, and the next he’s at full tilt in a 100-meter dash. In the very first over of the innings, Reece Topley produced two shapely out-swingers that pitched on a length and moved away from Gayle. He simply shouldered arms. But twice in that over, Topley erred slightly by landing the ball slightly fuller, underneath Gayle’s bat, and the mighty arms were swinging for the fences or terraces in this case.

PHOTOS: West Indies arrive with Gayle storm

England hadn’t done too badly with the bat. Joe Root and Jos Buttler had shown why they’re so highly regarded as T20 batsmen with knocks where they displayed their own disdain for bowlers. Their total of 182/6 too was a competitive one. But still as is the case when he’s in the opposition, Gayle was the overriding factor. If anything there was a sense of inevitability to it. The kind that cricket fans in India are now used to it, having seen him produce knocks of nonchalant belligerence so often in the IPL.

But before Gayle’s carnage came Marlon Samuels’ onslaught. Growing up, the two Jamaicans would often compete against each other in club matches, always trying their best to outscore the other. They would often chat about how unstoppable a force they would be if someday they played in the same team. And it was Samuels who really sent the English bowlers’ egos scrambling before Gayle hit them out of the park. He launched into an array of those typically awe-inspiring square-drives and cover-drives — opening up his stance, and the bat following through with a glorious flourish. Though the right-hander was dismissed as soon as England introduced spin for a 27-ball 37, he had allowed Gayle to get his body and arms warmed-up for the blitzkrieg.

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Adil Rashid did get Gayle in trouble on a couple of occasions by mixing up seam-up deliveries with his leg-breaks. But it didn’t take Gayle to get a hang of it, and soon the white ball was flying into the night sky regularly. Thus went England’s umpteenth out of the window or into the upper tiers of the Wankhede anyway. Though the required-rate languished near the 10 mark for the first half of the innings, Gayle brought it down to below 6 by smashing 66 in between overs 10-15 — a couple of short deliveries from Ben Stokes heading in the direction of the Arabian Sea — before bringing up his second T20 hundred with a lazily ambled single. It was Gayle who went down on his knees to acknowledge the cheers, but by then he had ensured that the English already had bruise marks on theirs.

There’s been a lot of talk about the Englishmen not having the IPL experience. But if this was just a teaser of what the IPL is all about as far as bowlers are concerned, Willey & Co might just reconsider that thought.

Brief Scores: England 182 for 6 in 20 overs (Joe Root 48 ( 36b, 3×4, 2×6), Jos Buttler 30 (20b, 3×6) Andre Russell 2-36; Dwayne Bravo 2/41) lost to West Indies 183/6 in 18.1 overs (Chris Gayle 100 n.o (48b, 5×4, 11×6) Marlon Samuels 37 (27b, 8×4); Adil Rashid 1/20) by 6 wickets.