According to the official statistics Chris Gayle is 188cm tall. These days, when he bends down to touch his toes he seems to feel every last one of them. Gayle made a dip in their direction right before he stepped over the boundary rope at the Hampshire Bowl on Friday, the idle stretch of a man only lately out of bed and getting ready for the day ahead. It was his last half-hearted gesture towards a warm-up before beginning this, his 521st international innings for West Indies, and his last against England unless the two teams play again in the knockout rounds of this World Cup. The way this one worked out, he will hope he gets that one last chance to set about them.
Gayle has always said everything changed for him when he had emergency heart surgery in 2005, after he had to retire from a Test against Australia because he was suffering from cardiac arrhythmia. “Looking down at the wire, the patches, my heart no longer jumping under my skin, I make the vow” was how he put it in his book Six Machine (it was ghostwritten, of course, the man has got better things to do than sit in front of a computer).
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