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Chanderpaul — striking the right balance

K.C. Vijaya Kumar

Cricket / If your technique is working for you, you should try and better it

— Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash

CAPTAIN’S DELIGHT: Shivnarine Chanderpaul, seen with Rahul Dravid, excels in batting according to the situation.

Bangalore: “Heard there is a big Shiva Temple nearby,” says Shivnarine Chanderpaul as his Indian roots stir. But as he leaves after the interview, Chanderpaul grins and adds with a touch of Caribbean drawl, “nothing stupid eh! Just nice it up in the papers.”

The mix-and-match personality traits are also reflected in his batting — be it dropping anchor or dismantling attacks and that too with a front-on stance that grates the purists.

“I have heard all kinds of comments. If your technique is working for you, you should try and better it. But sometimes I open up a little too wide, and you cannot do much if you get too wide. Then you try to get back to where you were. It is about getting the stance that will keep me still and balanced,” Chanderpaul says.

Valuable contribution

Poor aesthetics cannot diminish the value of his runs — 7,559 in Tests and 7,405 in one dayers.

And some of these runs were turbo-charged as evident in his four and six off Chaminda Vaas that helped West Indies smirk at the daunting equation of 10 runs required off the final two deliveries in a One-Day International match at Port of Spain in April. “You are thinking about what he might want to do, you are thinking about somehow hitting it out of the park, you got to focus, keep your mind clear, try to think like the bowler, you have to run all this in your mind,” says Chanderpaul.

The former West Indies captain, who is part of the Royal Challengers Bangalore team, opined that the Indian Premier League was a hint of things to come in cricket’s evolution.

“The IPL is a sign of where cricket is heading in the future. We have so many international players and it’s great to mingle with them. People here are cheering you more but I cannot complain because even when I came on international tours, they always cheered me,” Chanderpaul says.

IPL is huge

“The IPL is bigger than the Stanford T20 back home. This is better organised with a good mix of international players and a lot of keen young fellows,” he said.

The only Indian-origin player to have played 100 Tests for the West Indies, Chanderpaul has had a tough road.

A floating bone in his left foot troubled him in the early part of his career but the resultant pain was misconstrued.

“There was a report that I was faking injury,” he recalls. Chanderpaul subsequently underwent corrective surgery in Australia and the flurry of runs after that silenced the sceptics.

He also had a frustrating dalliance with captaincy which he flung aside.

“Probably it might have been helpful if the fellows could have been more co-operative. I had enough of it and I thought I would sacrifice it and let it go to someone else,” Chanderpaul says.

Great legacy

The Guyana-born Chanderpaul is aware that he is following the legacy of great West Indian players of Indian origin like Rohan Kanhai and Alvin Kallicharan.

“The big names are there and sometimes it does play on your mind. People expect so much but you can only go out and do what you can do. Nobody thought when I started out that I would be around so long,” he says before leaving to join his Bangalore teammates.

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