BANGALORE, INDIA // Chris Gayle had been here before, in his first season with Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB). Having failed to find a team for the 2011 Indian Premier League (IPL) season, he was back home in the Caribbean when Dirk Nannes suffered a side strain. Instead of getting another bowler as replacement, Bangalore opted for Gayle.
In his first eight innings that season, he pummelled 608 runs. The final, against Chennai Super Kings at Chepauk, was another matter. After Murali Vijay’s blistering 95 propelled the home team to 205, Gayle lasted just three balls before edging a skiddy delivery from R Ashwin to MS Dhoni behind the stumps. Bangalore would go on to lose by 58 runs.
In the next two seasons, Gayle made 733 and 708 runs, including a 30-ball century against Pune Warriors. But with the support cast inconsistent, Bangalore didn’t even make the play-offs. Gayle, however, revelled in the IPL fishbowl, and has admitted as much in Six Machine, his autobiography.
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“It’s like nothing else cricket has ever seen,” he says. “Owners want the best players in their team, and if you’re a star player you will be treated like a Bollywood hero. And that makes you want to deliver — to stand out by performing as well, to win titles, to live up to the expectations.”
Delivery had been a problem this season. Gayle started the season with scores of 1 and 0, before flying back to Jamaica for the birth of his daughter. Things got no better when he returned. His next three innings were 7, 5 and 6. It was only with Bangalore facing must-win scenarios at the end of the league phase that the old magic started to return.
He clubbed 49 from 31 balls against Kolkata, and then 73 from 32 against Kings XI Punjab. But with scores of 1 and 9 in the next two matches, he went into the final with just 151 runs to his name. Only in 2014, when he made 196 in nine innings, had he endured such a lean run in the IPL.
On Sunday night, it was as though the clocks had been wound back to 2011. Needing a mammoth 209 for victory, Gayle took just four deliveries to calibrate his sights.
A length ball from Barinder Sran was muscled over long-on for six. After that, Virat Kohli, who finished the tournament with a scarcely believable 973 runs, astutely turned over the strike as often as he could.
In the half-century partnership, Kohli’s contribution was 6. By the time Bangalore raced to 100 in just nine overs, Kohli’s share was 20. By then, Gayle was in his element, driving, pulling and lofting straight. In Twenty20 cricket though, momentum shifts can be as sudden and violent as an exocet into the stands.
Bangalore had 114 on the board in just 10.3 overs when Gayle sliced Ben Cutting to third man. Of the 38 balls he faced, eight had cleared the rope, and his 76 looked like it would be a tournament-winning hand.
Not so. For once, Kohli didn’t see a chase through, inside-edging Sran on to his stumps. AB de Villiers, whose unbeaten 79 against Gujarat Lions had sealed Bangalore’s place in the final, miscued Bipul Sharma to Moises Henriques, and the support cast simply wasn’t up to the task.
Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Mustafizur Rahman closed things off with some aplomb after Ben Cutting — man of the match for his 15-ball 39 and bowling figures of two-for-35 — had cleaned up KL Rahul with a slower delivery.
Gayle was his usual relaxed and smiling self at the presentation, but will know that such a chance may not come again. Bangalore won six of their last seven league games to make the play-offs, with De Villiers supplementing Kohli’s run feast with 687 of his own.
They played both knockout matches at home, but still couldn’t get over the line. Maybe, as is the case with Atletico Madrid’s Paseo de Los Melancolicos, the street outside the Chinnaswamy Stadium should be named Walk of the Melancholy.
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