Sportslinkpk Latest Sports News in English
Chris Gayle has sent out another warning to opponents world over that it isn’t time to write him off yet.
The Windies opener brought up his 21st Twenty20 hundred on Thursday 19 April, making an unbeaten 104 off 63 balls in the Indian Premier League (IPL) match for his franchise Kings XI Punjab against Kane Williamson’s Sunrisers Hyderabad.
Gayle smashed 11 sixes and a single four against an attack that featured some of the best T20 bowlers in Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Rashid Khan.
That made it two back-to-back Player-of-the-Match performances for him in his two appearances so far in the IPL. And it comes soon after his table-topping showing in the Bangladesh Premier League late last year, where he struck two centuries and had a remarkable strike-rate of 176.36.
He still has plenty to do this IPL, but with numbers like that behind him, he will head into his next international assignment, the Windies’ T20I hurricane relief match against an ICC World XI at Lord’s on May 31, high on confidence.
He went unsold in the first round of the IPL auction in January, and spent the opening games of the season on the bench, but Gayle said he didn’t have anything to prove.
“I’m not here to prove anything. I’ve done it all,” insisted Gayle after the match, even as he asked players and coaches around the world to “put some respect on the name”.
“A lot of people might say Chris has a lot to prove, [since] I didn’t get selected, didn’t get picked up earlier in the auction. But I can say Virender Sehwag (KXIP mentor) has saved IPL by picking me.”
His latest century was all about letting bowlers know who’s in charge, Gayle added. He was particularly punishing of Rashid, whose figures of 1/55 were his worst in the format. Gayle struck him for four sixes in a single over.
“[Rashid] is a key bowler. He’s been bowling phenomenally in this IPL and in his career. But I just wanted to put him under a bit of pressure. Just let him know that the Universe Boss is here,” he said. “It’s one of those things: Let bowlers know who’s in charge.”
As many as 8,376 of his 11,235 career T20 runs are from boundaries. But on Thursday in Mohali, Gayle played a more “calculated” innings, uncharacteristically running hard for the singles and twos.
“Yeah, I did some running today. It’s a big outfield, I can’t hit every ball for six!” laughed the 38-year-old. “Time waits for no one. You’ve got to run sometimes, you can’t walk all your life. So I’m really happy that everything was calculated well.”