One sultry Jamaican evening, I endured a wait of mounting futility to speak to Chris Gayle. The instruction had been to meet at his Triple Century Bar in downtown Kingston, but the interviewee was still sleeping off jet-lag at his bachelor pad, a temple of bling recently fitted out with its own strip club.
When he did at last emerge, about four hours late, he ordered a round of rum cocktails for his groupies and explained the hold-up with a laconic shrug. “Jamaica time, man,” he said, gold teeth glinting under the disco ball.
This is the same Chris Gayle touted, at the age of 36, as the saviour-in-waiting of the West Indies’ sclerotic Test team. The same Gayle who, as his colleagues were capitulating by 177 runs to Australia in Melbourne this week, was to be found a few miles across town, swishing a gold bat on his latest cash-grab in the Big Bash League.
There was a time when Caribbean cricket could summon heroes in the mould of Sir Garry Sobers, who said: “My whole obligation was to West Indies cricket. I’ve never made a run for me.” Now it clutches desperately for answers from men like Gayle, as transparently self-serving as they come.
As a Test force the West Indies are, in the wake of their filleting by the Australians, on the ragged edge of oblivion. Gayle is not, and never has been, the answer.
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