Archive for the Cricket Worldcup 2011 Category

Archive for the Cricket Worldcup 2011 Category

Kieron Pollard: The Devastation Personified?

Posted in Cricket Worldcup 2011  By Dr. Nauman Niaz
I have not changed my opinion about the patchy brilliance of the West Indies, both in the build up and during the World Cup 2011, but in other respects I have been forced by my experiences to undertake a major revision of my conceptual framework. Integrally a disintegrated team and Chris Gayle plus Ramnresh Sarwan boiling against the WICB, could provide evidence that the team was not likely to ascend in the tournament, there were critiques contemplating that Bangladesh could traverse through their contemplations and expectations to end up at least at number four in Group B to advance to the quarter-finals; The lesson I had learned was that the collapse of the West Indies team does not automatically lead to an open argument that their captain Darren Sammy wasn’t the choice who could philosophize the inherent power-share; Chris Gayle, however showed a definitive paradigm shift in his attitude, realizing the importance of his wicket, in the first three matches barring his early ouster against South Africa where he was strategically trumped, he resisted contemptuous stroke-play; methodizing and building his innings on wide-range accumulation rather than unrestrained aggression he also reached a personal milestone against Bangladesh as he completed 8000 runs in one-day international matches.
Apart from Devon Smith, Darren Bravo, Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnresh Sarwan, there was Kieron Adrian Pollard who could devastate all the bowlers whenever he could step down and execute his elevated over the long-on drive; powerful and equally destructive, his mesmerizing strike-rate could change the course of the match in a few minutes. As the World Cup 2011 started his aim was to make his batting into a prototype of the typical West Indies method, but he realized that this ambition could be a fertile fallacy if he didn’t consolidate his defence; nonetheless he depended on the support from the top for his survival; genetically an aggressor he had to come into play in situations cut for his role and that largely depended on Chris Gayle and Devon Smith.
In reality, Smith and Gayle played the role of deus ex-machina; but it takes a deus machina to alter the course of reason and activity; they did enterprisingly. Kieron Pollard as compared to lusty hitters such as Yusuf Pathan of India, Kevin O’ Brian of Ireland and Shahid Afridi from Pakistan is a more sophisticated, more advanced form of an unorthodox batsman. He normally requires only a single interpretation of reality: the one embodied in the prevailing team-competition dogma. He has formulated his own view of batsmanship, the task is so immense that it is impossible to make the transition from absolute.