On 19th February, 1992, a surprisingly prescient editorial appeared in Stabroek News. It was not a comment in the sports column. It was the main opinion piece. It opened as follows:
“Let us be the first West Indian newspaper to editorialise on a young man who one day may make the whole region proud. It is the earliest of days – in fact, his first match for Guyana – and we don’t want to swell young Chanderpaul’s head, but in the two days he was on show at Bourda he showed a glimpse of the astonishing eye, technique, timing, and appetite for run which one associates with future cricket greatness…
Young Chanderpaul is no more than a boy – the youngest cricketer ever to play for Guyana – and a lot could go wrong. He needs the right training, the right advice, a lot of judicious support, and, naturally, his fair share of luck. He will encounter failure and we will see how he deals with that. However, those who were fortunate enough to see Chanderpaul’s batting at Bourda in his first match for his country know that they were in the presence of a very rare talent. There was an aura about the slip of a boy as he batted that was unmistakable.”
That frail schoolboy has more than fulfilled those early expectations. He has, quite simply, become one of the very great Guyanese and West Indian batsmen. His slight figure, batting and battling hour after hour, never wavering in determination and concentration and supreme idiosyncratic skill, has become an instantly recognizable symbol of perseverance in the game of cricket. His place in the pantheon of cricketing immortals is absolutely assured.
Chanderpaul could be a dasher with the best of them – there was after all his 69 ball century when he smote Australia’s attack to all parts of Bourda in 2003 while making the second fastest Test hundred by a West Indian (only the incomparable Viv Richards’ 57 ball century against England faster than him) and in a famous limited over international against Sri Lanka Chanderpaul won the match for West Indies by hitting the last two balls of the game for a four and a mighty six.
But Chanderpaul’s great fame is not based on scoring quick runs. Indomitably he occupies the crease and steadily, inexorably, monumentally the runs accumulate. He has taken out long leases in all the Test grounds of the world.
Chanderpaul is in a category by himself and deserves the status of a dictionary word, Chanderpaulian, to describe his unique approach and achievement in the art of batting. In a ‘So It Go’ column not long ago Dave Martins identified a key factor in Chanderpaul’s success as keeping his head still. “Sure,” he wrote, “Shiv fidgets and stretches and squirms in advance but when he plays a shot his head is almost completely still, his eyes are fixed on the ball.”
That is absolutely correct. Another factor Dave identified was Chanderpaul’s compact striking of the ball. It is true.
Despite Chanderpaul’s fussiness the back-lift is completely unfussy, short and compact. Combine these attributes with his deft and precise footwork, his extraordinary ability to leave it to the last moment to play, or not to play, the speeding or the spinning ball and, of course, his iron will-power and blot-everything-else-out concentration and you have the composite portrait of a batsman unique in the annals of the game. He has faced 100 balls on average every Test innings he has played. Only Dravid (109) and Kallis (105) in the history of Test cricket have been more tenacious, and no other West Indian comes close – Lara (85). There has been no more gritty batsman. No batsman has more consistently frustrated bowlers.
In an era when West Indies cricket was in precipitous decline Chanderpaul was frequently the stalwart one who helped preserve a few bright shreds of pride. And since Brian Lara’s retirement he has been the one batsman who in the worst and most distracting of times at least kept us competitive.
Towards the end of Lara’s career Chanderpaul took on more and more of the responsibility of guiding a faltering West Indies batting line-up. Between 2005 and 2008 he scored over 3,000 runs at an average of 62.72. And in the 6 year period since Lara’s retirement Chanderpaul’s achievement has been world-topping. He has scored 15 of his 27 centuries in that hard and perilous period and his average is 70.
No wonder that in a team fallen near to the bottom of the Test ladder he has given us reason time and time again to hold our collective West Indian head high. He reached No1 in the Test batting rankings in 2008-09 and after slipping out of the top ten astonishingly returned to the top position in April, 2012. For a while others overtook him – but after his latest exploits in Bangladesh he is again in the No1 spot. At 38 I wonder if he is the oldest batsman to have achieved the highest standing in the game.
Kamau Brathwaite in his famous poem ‘Rites’ speaks forcefully about crises in the West Indian team:
When things going good
you cahn touch
we, but let murder start
an, ol man, you cahn fine
a man to hole up de side.
For years and years Shiv Chanderpaul has personified the man “to hole up de side.”
So far, Chanderpaul has made 10, 696 runs with 27 centuries in 146 Tests at an average of 51.67. The editorial in Stabroek News nearly 21 years ago ended with this hope:
“Let us wish the young man well as he embarks on what we have every reason to hope will be a brilliant career in regional and, in due course, international cricket.”
Chanderpaul, at the time still years away from playing for the West Indies, has exceeded such hopes. He has done Guyana and the West Indies exceedingly proud.
Let us now wish for this marvellous veteran a conclusion which will match the rest of his unique career – and may that conclusion stretch at least a few more wondrous and prolific seasons in the sun.
