5 reasons why Chris Gayle is different from your average cricketer

Christopher Henry Gayle is not merely a West Indies cricketer who conjures up a Gayle-storm when nobody is expecting it. Of course, he is the one who does that, but he does a lot of other things too in his attempt of carrying forward the legacy of his celebrated predecessors who used to be much more than simply cricketers.In an age of a few hundred technically proficient cricketers and many thousand improvisers, the Jamaican belongs to the endangered breed of reluctantly successful sports personalities for whom doing it in style is everything that matters.Here are five reasons why the Caribbean is a completely crazy cricketer:

#1 Gayle makes you feel inadequate

With his entire tall, dark, handsome demeanor along with his insatiable urge of seeking attention in the field by hammering sixes into the crowd and celebrating with dance moves, Chris Gayle is that kind of a man who will make you feel inadequate about yourself. Add to that his humility and fun nature – you are now looking at a human who couldn’t be more perfect.

He leaves bowlers with a sense of incompetence, batsmen with an inferiority complex, skippers with a feeling of ineptitude, fielders with a sense of uselessness and pitch curators stunned beyond belief.

#2 Running between the wickets is too mainstream

The statistics speak for themselves – 9139 runs in ODIs at a strike rate of 84.82 with 1034 fours and 229 sixes; 1406 runs in T20Is at 142.59 with 122 fours and 87 sixes. For a man who has scored more than 60% of his ODI runs and almost 72% of his T20I runs by sending the ball to the fence and beyond it, running between the wickets is nothing but an act of leisure.

However, the impressive statistics are hardly as flattering as the visuals. The tall man at the crease doesn’t like to adjust his backlift too much as he waits to prey on his opposition. He barely moves his feet, yet miraculously gets in a position to middle the ball with immaculate timing. And once he does that, he sends the ball out of the planet, through the nearest wormhole, back in time.

#3 Celebration is as important as making runs

With his Calypso moves and awkward-but-confident dancing inside the 22 yards after clinching a wicket, Gayle has emphasized the importance of proper celebration time and again. No wonder, the cameras zoom in on him instead of the crowd every time West Indies scalps a wicket.

You can always trust Gayle to come up with something new each time just like Sunil Narine comes up with six different deliveries in an over. Surprisingly, his distorted version of Gangnam style looks barely as repulsive as Harbhajan’s version of the same despite both being mildly more than embarrassing.

#4 Party animal, is that you?

No IPL parties could be over until he is there. He comes, he sees, and he parties hard. Partying on the field during the day, partying off it at night – ladies and gentlemen, that’s Chris Gayle for you.

He parties with cricketers, he parties with footballers. He parties with Kingfisher models, he parties with Bollywood actors. In fact, Gayle parties so much that he gets into trouble for having two girls with him in his hotel room during the T20 World Cup. But that’s not before he rakes up a major controversy for sharing personal moments with Sherlyn Chopra in an IPL after-match party.

#5 In Gayle\'s opinion, rebelling is cool

It takes an immense sense of security or simply a reckless attitude about life to show the national board the middle finger, but whatever be it, Gayle has done it more than a couple of times with what one may call ‘swagger’.

Financial problems have been an inseparable story with the WICB for almost a decade now and, unfortunate as it may sound, cricketers are no strangers to boycotting tours when the board refuses to meet their demands. Six years ago in a similar incident, Gayle had found himself being prominently involved when the senior players refused to take part in a home series against Bangladesh, thereby irking the ruling body.

His adorable relationship with the selectors continues to blossom with him being summoned to appear before a disciplinary commission recently to explain his accusations on the eve of this big tournament against the board for dropping Dwayne Bravo and Kieron Pollard from the World Cup squad as penalty for their involvement in last October’s abandoned tour of India.