No doubt over Gayle’s commitment

-says Bennet King

There should be no doubt over Chris Gayle’s commitment to Test cricket after the West Indies captain underwent a Aus$25,000 heart operation to save his career on the 2005 tour of Australia, former head coach Bennett King told an Australian newspaper yesterday.

King, the Australian who was in charge of the team from 2004 to 2007 when he resigned after the World Cup in the Caribbean, recalled what the Sydney Sunday Telegraph described as Gayle’s “traumatic battle with a congenital heart defect that jeopardised his international future”.

Gayle underwent surgery in Melbourne to correct an irregular heart beat after feeling nauseous during his first innings of the second Test in Hobart forced him to retire. He missed the third and final Test.

The operation was a success and five months later he amassed his highest Test score, 317, against South Africa in St John’s, Antigua.

Gayle said at the time that the condition had been “happening over the years”. King suspects the left-handed opener may have turned a blind eye to it in his desire to play Test cricket.

Gayle is not the only member of the family to experience such problems.

He flew back from the current tour of Australia last week to be at the hospital bedside of his mother who is being treated for a heart condition while he spent part of the US$1million he won in the Stanford Twenty20 match against England last November to fund heart surgery for his brother.

The 30-year-old veteran of 82 Tests and 202 ODIs has been widely criticised for his comment in a newspaper interview during the West Indies tour of England last May that he would “not be so sad’” if Test cricket gave way to the Twenty20 version.

He was also among the players who opted out of the home series against Bangladesh in July because of the West Indies Players Association (WIPA) contractural dispute with the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB).

But King saw another side of Gayle during his time as coach.

“Chris needed to get the operation done for the sake of his health and his cricket,” he said. “Chris’s heart would beat really rapidly, to the point where it stopped him from being able to do anything.”

“He’d had the problem all his life apparently, but towards the end of that Australian tour it started to appear more frequently,” he added. “By having an operation, it gave Chris a better opportunity to perform.”

King revealed that the first warning came in 2004 when Gayle complained of dizziness during a match on the tour of South Africa.

The problem has reportedly not recurred since. (TC)