Gayle slow with his 175 off 66

An amazing bout of sustained hitting it certainly was, but Chris Gayle was unable to hit six sixes in a row in his amazing IPL innings.

 

Jordan Clark hit six sixes though, for Lancashire 2nd XI.   Good going - he has matched what has been done 4 times in first class cricket.

 

It seems batsmen are finding it easier and easier to hit sixes and bowlers everywhere of course argue that the bats have got far better, but equally they seem to keep bowling length.   If you watch Gayle's innings, there's very few good (in the context of Twenty20) balls that he's hitting for six - they're nearly all length balls.   Yes, Malinga gets it wrong sometimes, but why don't more people bowl to hit the toes, a la Malinga.   If he gets it wrong he can be expensive, but more often than not he keeps even the best batsmen under control, as he did in the final over he bowled yesterday that cost 3 (one of them a leg bye) and allowed his team Mumbai to win in a tight match.

 

Flat pitch but a special Gayle innings...

Chris Gayle is playing a blinder in his first Test after being replaced as captain of West Indies. You can check out the scorecard here. He's just short of his best of 317 as a type, and has every chance of beating the world record, if he keeps his head.

It seems it's a batsman's game with Brendan McCullum scoring a double hundred today, which he brought up with a scoop over the keeper's left shoulder, and unbeaten centuries for Amla and Kallis yesterday....

Sammy takes over West Indies captaincy

It's difficult to underplay the difficulty that Darren Sammy will have bringing unity to the West Indies side after being asked to takeover the captaincy by the WICB from Chris Gayle. With various players, including Gayle and Bravo, not accepting contracts from the Board, there are bound to be cliques opening up and Sammy can't claim to be in consideration for a slot in a World XI in the way that Gayle can.

Let's hope for the sake of West Indies cricket that Gayle is totally supportive of Sammy - if his previous protestations that he wasn't that fussed about the captaincy were true, then he should be.

More Duckworth-Lewis agony for England

We've been here before in Twenty20 haven't we? As if the game isn't a lottery enough when played over the full 20 overs, when the D/L is brought into play it seems to massively favour the side batting second. West Indies will be very happy with the result, but even Chris Gayle said afterwards that they need to look into how the calculations are made such was the advantage it gave his side, and this is the second time they have benefited against England in the World Twenty20.

Recently Daniel Vettori also raised the fact that the D/L method stuggles to take into account powerplays, and that's a further issue. It's difficult to know what the solution is, but what I can say is that England's over scores were: 5, 16, 9, 11, 10, 9, 11, 4, 5, 8, 3, 6, 8, 4, 6, 16, 14, 27, 10, 9.

If you were to take their top 3 overs and bottom 3 overs that would equal 70: 27, 16, 16, 3, 4, 4.
If you took their top 6 overs that would equal 95: 27, 16, 16, 14, 11, 11.
Somehow West Indies were asked to chase 60.

We all understand that the D/L method takes into account historical data but in a format with virtually no historical data to go on, an alternative needs to be considered until there is a sufficient body of games to go from, you would think wouldn't you? Presumably the ICC are praying that England beat Ireland now (no guarantee at all given the lottery of Twenty20), but somehow I don't think they're that fussed about the best team winning if their slow and poor adoption of technology to help umpires is anything to go by...

Gayle hit for six by Usain Bolt

It seems that 100m world record holder and olympic champion Usain Bolt can hold a bat....and is even better with the ball.

It's always good seeing sporting celebs playing cricket as it pushes the sport to wider audiences, but I'm not sure how much club cricket a footballer (like Gary Lineker of old) or rugby player (like Rob Andrew did) might play these days in the UK. Presumably none given the risk of injury and the fact that their season lasts 10 months. A pity....

Big hitters

With all the media focusing on Twenty20 at the moment, the Daily Mail (no - I don't normally ever read anything from the Daily Mail....oh, the shame!) has been running a series of articles about the biggest hitters in the game. This culminated in yesterday's numbers 1-10.

I can't say I agree that someone like Chris Gayle should be down at 18 or that Shahid Afridi isn't in the top 10, but there we go. I'll let you decide if you think there is any sense of reality to the rankings, while of course remembering that bats have got a lot better over the years....

Beware the wounded West Indian tiger....

Interesting to see how West Indies cricket always gets a slating in the run up to Test series against England and there is no doubt they've slid a long way since their glory days. This Stephen Brenkley article in The Independent, sums things up nicely by returning to the merits of Chanderpaul and Gayle, in cricketing terms, at the end of the article.

Who's the top-rated Test batsman in the world? Chanderpaul.

Who's the 2nd highest rated ODI batsman in the world? Gayle.

Perhaps we should be a little less hasty in assuming that we'll march to an easy victory and a little more supportive of the plight of this disparate group of islands...I wonder if my wife would see it as an altruistic thing to do if I was to suggest that a group of us go to watch the next England tour of the West Indies?!

Questions

Why does W H Smith at Waterloo station keep The Wisden Cricketer on the top shelf with all the other magazines you'd expect to see there?

Why did Chris Gayle need a runner in the last test for a broken thumb?

Why do they measure the speed of a cricket ball in miles per hour when it will never go for a mile or for an hour ? What we need is a measure based on how deep it would go into a hedge at that speed or how many fingers it would break.