Chris Gayle’s batting strategy is unique

By T.W.

THE 10th season of the Indian Premier League (IPL), cricket’s richest and glitziest tournament, will end on May 21st, when Rising Pune Supergiant face either the Mumbai Indians or the Kolkata Knight Riders in the final in Hyderabad. To the disappointment of many neutrals Chris Gayle, a big-hitting West Indian batsman, will not be a part of it. Mr Gayle’s Royal Challengers Bangalore team flopped miserably. Even so, no player has has embodied the first decade of the IPL more.

Mr Gayle made an inauspicious start to his IPL career. He was not even picked up in his first auction in 2008. In 2011 he was only called up as a replacement player. Like the IPL itself, Mr Gayle has also attracted much attention off the pitch. The “KingGayle” Instagram feed documents the ceaseless partying of the self-proclaimed “Universe Boss”; in Australia last year he was lambasted as a sexist after using a mid-match interview to flirt with a female presenter, asking her out for a drink and telling her, “don′t blush, baby”.

Yet anyone tempted not to take Mr Gayle’s cricket seriously need only look at his statistics. In the fast-paced Twenty20 format, he towers above his contemporaries much as W.G. Grace or Don Bradman, batting giants of yore, once did in longer forms of the game. Consider this array of records. Mr Gayle has made the format’s highest score (175 not out in the 2013 IPL), the fastest-ever century (in the same innings) and the joint fastest half-century. He recently became the first player to score 10,000 runs in T20 cricket, some 2,447 more runs than his nearest rival. He has scored 18 T20 centuries; no one else has managed more than seven. He has hit 746 sixes, the format’s defining shot, 277 more than anyone else. And, just for good measure, he has also scored more fours than any other player.

In amassing all these records, the Jamaican has not merely played T20 better than the competition, he has also played it differently. Mr Gayle hits 11% of the deliveries he faces for six. The average among opening batsmen is 3.5%. Even David Warner and Brendon McCullum, two of the most belligerent T20 openers around, hit only about 6% of the balls they face for maximums, according to data from CricViz, an analytics company. Interestingly, Mr Gayle also plays out more dot balls (non-scoring deliveries), especially at the start of his innings. CricViz finds that he fails to score off 54% of the balls he faces in the first 10 overs of the IPL, comfortably the most of any of the ten highest-scoring batsmen in the competition during this period. While other openers are adept at scampering sharp singles off deliveries they cannot hit to the boundary, Mr Gayle is prone to leaving the ball alone entirely. He is all or nothing.

Mr Gayle's approach of adjusting to conditions and playing himself in has worked brilliantly for him. But it does not always work for his team. When he is out early, that initial inertia is an extraordinary waste of resources in a format in which sides are expected to score at a rate of more than a run a ball. In the 2012 World T20 final he scored three runs in 16 balls before being dismissed; in a Pakistan Super League match earlier this year, he took 34 balls over 29 runs.

Other criticisms are levelled at Mr Gayle, too—in particular, that he has turned his back on the longer forms of the game. Despite averaging 42.18 in Test cricket and scoring 15 centuries, he rarely makes himself available for what purists consider the pinnacle of the sport. (As captain, he once declared that he “wouldn't be so sad” if Test cricket died.) Instead, he has become one of the first truly freelance players, gallivanting between different domestic T20 leagues, playing for whichever can stump up the most cash. Thus far, he has represented 20 different T20 teams, yet another record.

This has enabled Mr Gayle to hone his skills and earn wealth far exceeding what he could have made in international cricket. A report last year from the Federation of International Cricketers Associations, a players’ body, found that a top West Indies cricketer could make over twice as much playing in domestic T20 leagues around the world than in international cricket.

As a result, other leading Caribbean cricketers have followed Mr Gayle’s path in the T20 leagues. In one sense, this has been an advantage for the West Indies team. Whereas their players specialise in T20, other nations’ international cricketers must juggle three formats in an ever-more arduous schedule. That has helped the West Indies become superb in the shortest form of the game; they have won two of the last three editions of the World T20 tournament. However, in another sense, specialisation has been disastrous. Of the West Indies’ squad that won the WT20 last year, just three players have subsequently played a Test match, and leading players have only spasmodically been available in one-day international (ODI) cricket. The West Indies, the leading Test nation for two decades until 1995, have slipped to eighth in the Test rankings and ninth in ODIs. They have failed to qualify for this year’s Champions Trophy, a tournament for the top eight sides, for the first time in their history.

So Mr Gayle’s career choices have been almost as pioneering as his astounding six-hitting ability. But, nearing 38, his own future is uncertain. He is lax at running between the wickets, hampering the chance to scamper quick singles and twos, and can also be ponderous in the field, out of sync with the increasing athleticism required in T20. He was dropped several times this IPL season, and might not even be picked up in next year’s auction. Mr Gayle is surely the finest player in T20 history, and one of the most significant cricketers of the modern age. Yet the paradox is that, while his career path might well be a template for the sport's future, in many ways his game itself is not.