Beside a cluster of candy-coloured beach-huts alongside the two-mile promenade at Long Bay, Antigua, Kieron Pollard is reconstructing the six sixes he belted in an over of a T20 International in opposition to Sri Lanka at Antigua’s Coolidge Oval in March.
First six: “Just took a chance, didn’t hit it cleanly, but it flew really well.” Second six: “Straight into the slot, that’s my game.” Third six: “Outside the off-stump, over the eye-line. I back myself, every time out of 100 balls.” Fourth six: “Slog sweep, not my favourite shot, but middled it.” Fifth six: “Just pure power. No timing, no feet, no sort of anything. Just see ball and use my strength.” Sixth six: “Free swing, cannot be LBW (bowler is bowling around the stumps). So I swung, the ball was on the legside and the breeze helped it along.”
It’s not the strokes or the descriptions that bewitch David Furlonge, Pollard’s Trinidad and Tobago coach. But, “the look in his eyes.”
“You see that, you understand his desire, his drive, and everything you want to know about him,” Furlonge tells The Indian Express. It tells a narrative, because it did to Furlonge a number of years in the past on the Queen’s Park Oval Cricket Club.
A thin, taller-for-his-age teenager was standing on the doorways of Trinidad’s most prestigious cricket membership. Someone — an area scout or acquaintance, Furlonge scratches his reminiscence — launched him as a “talented boy from the suburb”. He requested his age. A stern voice replied: “14”. Furlonge informed him: “Buddy, come back when you are 15.”
Back within the day, the membership was not an excessive amount of into junior cricket, and the ‘come back next year’ line was a euphemism for rejection. Many youngsters don’t typically return — within the Caribbean, he says, “kids move on fast”— however Furlonge knew Pollard would come again subsequent 12 months. “That look in his eyes. The desire I saw, I knew he would come back.”
He did return, per week after turning 15. Taller and stronger, just like the Caribbean tearaway archetype. The scout apprised: “He knocks over heads.” But on the nets, he first picked up the bat and never the ball. “Strong, powerful, good hand-eye coordination, needed a bit of polishing.” The coach requested him the place he usually bats. He replied: “No 10”.“At that moment I felt like ripping his schoolmaster apart,” recollects Furlonge.
That schoolmaster was Aslim Mandol, the agriculture instructor who doubled up because the cricket coach at Success Laventille Composite School. He had his personal causes although. “If the school had allocated more budget for buying cricket balls, we would have opened every single time with Kieron, because he was hitting every ball out into the swamp or bushes,” he says, chuckling. He has misplaced depend of the variety of glasses he had damaged too. But in inter-school matches, he was pushed up the order unhesitatingly.
His early coaches couldn’t be faulted for seeing a bowler in him — the Atlas-like shoulders, Hercules-like forearms and the Prometheus-like fireplace in his eyes have been irresistibly fast-bowler-like. At his peak, with a brief run-up, extra of a stroll, Pollard hit late 130s kph. Perhaps a Trinidadian Sobers? Could legitimately declare the ‘T20 Sobers’ title although — 11,232 runs, 300 wickets, 313 catches. And six sixes in an over too.
Pollard drew plenty to the stadium, even for age-group video games. Crowds would swell to look at him — sooner or later somebody even introduced a metal band. “They came in droves to watch him. He has hit some of the longest sixes I have ever seen,” says Furlonge. “It’s an instinct, second nature for him.”
Often, his mom Hazel would come to look at him. She nearly all the time had one question for the coaches: “Is her son competent enough to have a future in the game?” She was elevating Pollard and his two youthful sisters all by herself and couldn’t afford her son to linger too lengthy earlier than starting to earn and help the household. “She was doubtful but at the same time, wanted her son to do what he really liked. So, she used to ask us whether her son was good enough. We used to tell her he was very, very good,” Furlonge says.
That fireplace in his eyes was his household, his vaulting ambition to succeed the desperation to place meals on his household’s desk. Before begrudging him as a T20 mercenary, earlier than condescending him because the philistine freelancer, one must know who Pollard is and the place he’s from.
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Tacarigua, some 20km from Port of Spain, was probably the most infamous suburbs in Trinidad on the stroke of the century. Drugs, ganja, gang flare-ups, and murders have been frequent. Throw poverty into the combo, childhood was like strolling by a carpet of coal.
It was tough, Pollard informed The Sydney Morning Herald in 2010: “It was pretty tough, it wasn’t ideal getting up and your mum say ‘We only have X amount of money’. It was pretty hard growing up, and we had a lot of sacrifices to make in order to play cricket because cricket is an expensive game, all the equipment and getting sponsors. It was a place where there are a lot of criminal activities, and stuff like that.”
Pollard had no cricket gear of his personal — he had to make use of the frequent kits within the college. One day, his mom managed him a second-hand gear, which he thrillingly took to the varsity. But his pure means was such that Mandol knew he would overcome all these struggles. “Even back then, he was very motivated, and we knew that he was not the kind to do drugs. Give him a bat or a ball, he would play cricket all day long,” he says.
The mom, although, was all the time anxious and needed her son to do properly in lecturers in order that they might be redeemed from poverty. “It was the way back then. Study well, get a good job. A future in the sport is uncertain,” he says.
It was a tough time for a cricketer within the Caribbean too. The slide of West Indies as a cricketing superpower was in full swing. Fighting teammates, Russian roulette in captaincy and administrative chaos and apathy had shaken its edifice.
The riches of T20 have been distant too. All these might have formed Pollard’s priorities and decisions, most strongly his prioritising of membership over nation. He was not cricket’s first freelancer, however maybe the youngest. He was barely 25, entering into the height of his profession, whereas most freelancers then have been over-the-hill veterans. The flashpoint got here in 2010, when he refused the West Indies Cricket Board’s central contract in order that he might play T20 cricket for Somerset.The backlash was stinging. Michael Holding stated: “Kieron Pollard, in my opinion, is not a cricketer.” Pollard was, in his personal phrases, “made to feel worse than the rebel cricketers (who toured South Africa).”
Such condemnations have been to not stall or cease him — he had been or continues to be on the payrolls of 18 franchises. He has been, like all of mankind, monetising a present of his for a dwelling. The reward of hitting sixes, the golden forex in T20 cricket. He has struck 758 sixes, behind solely Chris Gayle (1,042), nearly with the identical frequency (as soon as each 9.7 balls to Gayle’s 9.4 balls).
He as soon as informed Tim Wigmore and Freddie Wilde within the e-book Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution: “You would never understand the situation until you are in the situation.” Pollard was not a daily fixture within the West Indies workforce in any format, his future was unsure in Caribbean cricket, T20 leagues have been sprouting all over the world, and past it, he needed to maintain his household. After he was dropped from the West Indies workforce for the primary time, nobody bothered to name or console him.“Yes, I wasn’t performing. But afterwards, nobody called or said anything. If I had given myself until 25 and not made it big, I would have gone back to school and become a law enforcer,” he had as soon as stated.
At that point, he was married and had grow to be a father too. Responsibilities have been swelling. “My mother is getting older, so I want to give her the best possible retirement life she could have. I have started my own family as well, so it’s a matter of me trying to work hard enough to provide for my family so that they won’t have to go through what I went through when I was growing up,” he informed The Sydney Morning Herald.
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It’s akin to a carnival each time Pollard finds time to play for Trinidad. When he’s there, the whole workforce is star-struck. “He takes them to his room. They will be playing cards or video games. All fun, when he’s around. Everyone wants to be with him, just as he wants to be with them,” says Furlonge.
Though it started as a coach-ward bond, then morphed right into a father-son relationship, Pollard and Furlonge are extra like brothers now. “We go for drives, have chats, go for an occasional drink, celebrate anniversaries together. He is someone who values friendships and has friends everywhere.”
There are many who name him their finest pal. Dwayne Bravo and him go a good distance, the latter really useful him to Mumbai Indians, talked about him within the ‘Champion’ tune and calls him his son’s ‘father-in-law’. To the Pandya brothers, he’s a brother in arms. To Nicholas Pooran, he’s a father determine, who was beside his hospital mattress when he suffered a life-threatening automotive crash. Since his reinstallation as West Indies captain, he has unwaveringly supported proficient however under-firing younger weapons like Shimron Hetmyer and Pooran.
“It is an opportunity for us to be there for these youngsters (Pooran and Hetmyer) and give them a hug and protect them, then let them come out of it. As a team, we are willing to work with these youngsters because we know what they can do.”At the Queen’s Park Club, kids anticipate Pollard’s arrival. Charity video games, fundraising video games, donations for hurricane victims, Pollard is simply an SMS away. “He will bring them kits, jerseys, and of course, a lot of love. To him, it is all a big family,” says Furlonge.
In that sense, Pollard is a contradiction — the cricketer who considers each workforce a household can also be essentially the most promiscuous one, having pulled over shirts of 18 totally different sides, from Bridgetown to Dhaka, Multan to St Lucia and Cape Town. He will not be a freelancer because the cricket world had imagined — chilly and callous, plastic and pretentious.
Maybe, he’s extra of a misunderstood cricketer. To perceive his motivations, one wants to grasp his scenario, the upbringing and background. To admire his six-hitting prowess, although, all it takes is YouTube.
