This is not, repeat not, a Chris Gayle column. No, really. Come back! It’s a captaincy column, with a bit of Chris Gayle thrown in at the start. In any case we’ve all moved on by now. Gayle himself has said sorry. The cricket journalist he tried to flirt with during an embarrassing pitch-side interview at the Big Bash has had her own measured say on things.
Plus there is simply no point in doing another Chris Gayle: What Does It All Mean piece now Malcolm Knox, a fine and widely respected Australian journalist has written an 800-word newspaper column in bad Jamaican patois – this is not a joke: it really happened in Australia – in order to show Gayle exactly how it feels to be treated like, er … To be made to feel … Well. Something or other. “Jah rule, mon,” the Bad Patois Take-Down begins. And then goes on. For ages. The point being, of course, the writer himself isn’t being racist here. He is instead using racism to educate a Jamaican.
To be fair there were two interesting things about the Bad Jamaican Patois Take-Down. First it was a clear breach of my own strict Bad Jamaican Patois code, which states that if you ever look down at your screen and see not only a couple of lines of Bad Jamaican Patois or an intro, but an entire rambling page of Bad Jamaican Patois something, somewhere has gone wrong. It’s a red flag. And an all-too common one too. We all have our own unpublished Bad Jamaican Patois novel in a drawer at home somewhere. Famously, Marcel Proust wrote the original drafts of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu in elegant, allusive Bad Jamaican Patois but ended up rewriting the whole thing in French on the advice of his editor.
Beyond this the Bad Jamaican Patois Take-Down may even shine some unintentional light on one or two other things. Such as, for example, the energetically caricatured way Australian TV has embraced Gayle from the start, a kind of aw-mate-just-luv-you-fellas tone that chimes eerily with the Bad Patois Take-Down itself. Mic’d up, pandered to, paid to strut about being Chris Gayle – Be cool for us! Be Jamaican! – it isn’t hard to see how an on-the-make, couldn’t-care-less cricketer might find himself acting out, egged on by hoots of studio laughter, a cartoonish ideal of the super-cool Caribbean man.
Hey, you never know. That may even be a good topic for a piercing, risky newspaper column about prejudice and respect in Australian cricket. Or alternatively, you know, just go with the 800 words of Bad Jamaican Patois. But wait! Come back. This isn’t a Chris Gayle column. It’s about captaincy. Although it does start with Gayle, whose most interesting interview isn’t the one he got into trouble for in Australia but one he gave to my colleague Anna Kessel after West Indies had lost the first Test against England at Lord’s in 2009.
Gayle, the West Indies captain, had turned up two days before because of a clash with the IPL. First he announced he wouldn’t care much if Test cricket died. Then he talked about how much he hated being the captain, how he would give it up as soon as he could, how there were other things he wanted to do with his “free time”.
At the time there was a degree of outrage at this. Reading it then my own reaction was, oh no, you can’t say that. What if everyone says it. What if it turns out deep down no one wants to go on with all this. What if he’s right. Which, of course, it turns out he is to an extent. The cricketing world has gone a little Gayle.
Unwilling Test captains are suddenly a theme. In the past year six have either resigned or threatened to slope off quite soon. Hashim Amla went last week. AB de Villiers, his replacement, could quit Tests altogether before long. Brendon McCullum is off in February. Brendan Taylor has retired to play in England. MS Dhoni finally stopped pretending a year ago, stepping aside so a younger generation of India cricketers could have the chance to mope about pretending to enjoy playing Test cricket.
Money, as ever, plays a part in this. Of the top 10 earners in world cricket only two are still playing Tests. Four are former or soon to be former captains. The gravity has shifted. How much easier and more lucrative in your 30s – once the golden Test captaincy years – to cart your star power around the franchises rather than struggling on in the gruelling minor-sport ceremonials of the old world.
Paradoxically there has been some interesting Test captaincy in recent times, spurts of funkiness injected via the shorter forms. Plus of course some are still standing against the tide. Alastair Cook isn’t going anywhere. Steve Smith is embedded. Misbah ul-Haq will continue, at least for another Test tour of England, to knit Pakistan cricket together.
What has gone is the vital sense of tension on all sides. Test captaincy, as an era-building drama, has always relied on a sense of sustained obsession, the nobility of the struggle, the kind of tension that binds a successful TV sitcom together. Everyone here is trapped within the same dynamic. No one is walking away until we’re done. You always got the feeling those revolving England captains of the 1980s, Gatting, Gower and Gooch would, if pushed, garotte each other with a coat hanger for another shot, another doomed snatching of the crown. For the great West Indies teams, for Imran Khan’s Pakistan, captaincy of your country was the only real outlet for greatness, the only repository for those driving energies.
Captaincy, in long-form cricket, has always been about holding together, about control. People, ceremony, cultures, weather, buildings, travel, meals, atmosphere: Test captains kept the whole procession together, cricket’s own blazered dads at the front of the bus.
This has now shifted. There has been a fragmentation. Cricket’s new world is about individualism, portable skills, being your own self-propelling captain, required just to turn up and be brilliant. Gayle is nothing if not a brilliantly modern cricketer, always in the vanguard of where his sport is going. He was speaking from this place in that genuinely weird Australian TV interview, a man acting without a captain, without a governing body, without structure or constraints, out there floating in his tin can, high above the world.
He may be 36 but he has spent the meat of his career running ahead of the tide, enabler of the new world, first of the refusenik captains and now a kind of sleazeball savant. Look around. He was right then. He’s still out there now. And the world has indeed gone Gayle.
