-Keiron Pollard has not yet played a test match but he is the first West Indian superstar to have a megarich bank account solely by being a Twenty20 special talent
He hasn’t played a single Test match.
His batting average in 15 One-Day Internationals is 11.30, in 10 Twenty20 Internationals 17.20. His top score in either version is 42.
The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) doesn’t even consider him worthy of one of the retainer contracts it has so liberally handed out recently to others on dubious grounds.
Yet, at the age of 22, Keiron Pollard is one of the wealthiest, most sought after cricketers on the planet, the personification of the brazen new world of what had been the most traditional of all the many sports created by the English and exported to the scattered outposts of what was once its global empire.
He is the first West Indian whose superstar reputation and megarich bank account has been made purely through the shortest and latest devised version of the game, theTwenty20 phenomenon that has swept all before it across the cricketing map (with the exception, of course, of the West Indies where the WICB can’t yet get a regional tournament going).
Other players, such as the equally big-hitting Chris Gayle and the ebullient all-rounder Dwayne Bravo, have quickly adapted to the all-action format but their status had been long since made in the more conventional formats.
Pollard’s has been purely as a Twenty20 specialist.
For all his modest statistics, the massive Trinidadian’s high-priced value to a game in which the action is crammed into 20 overs an innings is based on his physical power and hand-eye coordination that allow him to belt five-and-half-ounces of leather further, and more regularly, than most contemporary batsmen.
Almost entirely through his Twenty20 exploits, Pollard has already filled his bank account with numbers well in excess of even the greatest players of earlier generations.
He shared in Trinidad & Tobago’s US$1.5 million prize money in the two Stanford tournaments and $1.3 million in the 2009 Champions League and earned US$1 million as one of Stanford’s Superstars that beat England in the contentious 20/20 for 20 million match in 2008.
He signed lucrative contracts with the South Australian Redbacks for the inter-state Big Bash that ended yesterday (he clubbed the top score 44 off 33 balls with two sixes in a losing cause) and Somerset for next season’s county Twenty20.
To top it off, he fetched the maximum US$750,000 from the Mumbai Indians in last week’s Indian Premier League (IPL) auction, forcing a scrap between the four franchises who were all willing to go beyond the IPL cap to secure him. Mumbai won, by putting up what has been variously estimated as between an additional US$1million and US$2million.
All this has not come as a complete surprise to West Indians who have followed Pollard’s pyrotechnics since he began his first-class career, at 19, by hitting seven sixes in 126 from 150 balls against Barbados on debut.
He followed that with six sixes in 117 off 87 balls against the Leewards and a 58-ball 87 against Guyana in a KFC Cup one-day match. More such devastation followed in the Stanford tournaments.
His 174 against Barbados last season showed that he is capable of long innings as well but it was the global stage of the inaugural Champions League, with its wide television coverage and, significantly, in India, the home of the IPL, that propelled Pollard into million-dollar prominence.
He was one of the many heroes of a Trinidad & Tobago team that advanced to the final and was the talk of the tournament.
He hoisted 14 sixes high into Hyderbad night sky and far back into the stands of the Rajiv Gandhi Stadium.
His unbeaten 54 from 18 balls, with five sixes and five fours, effectively trounced New South Wales Blues by itself. He 146 runs in five innings were made at a strike rate of 197.29 runs per 100 balls.
It was just what the billionaire tycoons and Bollywood stars who own IPL franchises were looking for, Pollard’s stiff medium-paced bowling and safe outfield catching boosting his value.
Pollard is shrewd enough to appreciate the pressure he is now under. Club owners in every sport don’t make such investments without expecting returns – and, in the case, of the IPL, immediately.
“The biggest challenge would be to sustain what I’ve started as there would be big expectations of me,” he said after the IPL auction. “But cricket is a funny game, it can go anyway. I’m just going to go there and play my best.”
Whatever else, Pollard’s example has suddenly altered the overall approach to the game. Since it was in its infancy, the need for a balance between defence and attack, and an appreciation of when to apply each, was drilled into batsmen.
Concentration and application were key words. A century was the first aim. Brian Lara went past 300 and 400 in Tests and reached 500 in a county match.
In contrast, Gayle’s 117 from 57 balls against South Africa in Johannesburg in 2007 remains the only three-figure innings in Twenty20 internationals. Pollard needed only 74 balls to amass his 146 runs in the Champions League.
When a couple of dot balls can be the difference between victory and defeat – and sometimes a cool million dollars or so – deep field catches and frantic run outs proliferate. So what do coaches now advise their young charges?
Kraigg Brathwaite, for instance, has been vital as the anchor of the 50-overs innings in the current Under-19 World Cup in New Zealand.
He batted through the innings for 92 off 125 balls against Pakistan and solidly compiled 69 off 96 deliveries in the quarter final against England yesterday while Andre Creary attacked for a run-a-ball 52 in their partnership of 103. But anchors are not a requirement for 20 overs.
Aged 18, Brathwaite already has 40 hundreds – or it is 41, or 42? – at all levels. He will surely be opening the batting for the West Indies in Tests in the foreseeable future. But he, and others brought up adhering to the traditional methods, won’t be fetching Pollard prices at IPL auctions and the like, if they are on the block at all.
Those of his age, seduced by the loot on offer from Twenty20, might well concentrate on six hitting rather than century-scoring. But not everyone can be a Pollard or a Gayle.
There is a widespread feeling that Twenty20 will eventually be cricket’s one and only format, filling stadiums in presently virgin territory such as the U.S. and China.
It would be a very shallow game if that proves correct. It is more likely that Tests and Twenty20 will coexist in which case there will be the need for specialist players for each, for the Brathwaites and the Pollards, and for separate methods of coaching.
