There’s more than just bling behind Chris Gayle, the coolest cricketer on the planet

But he is certainly the “sixiest”.

The self-styled ‘Universe Boss’, who once described himself as “a hot boy” whom “girls love”, recently became the first man to hit 1,000 sixes in T20 cricket.

Gayle is as renowned for his six-hitting skills as Geoffrey Boycott was for his forward-defensive abilities.

He even called his autobiography Six Machine – that’s the ‘Universe Boss’, not our Geoffrey.

To deal, first of all, with the six-hitting milestone.

Gayle – who reached the landmark playing for Kings XI Punjab against Rajasthan Royals in the Indian Premier League – has now hit 1,001 sixes in his T20 career.

That is a whopping 307 more than the next man, fellow West Indian Kieron Pollard (694), and an even more whopping 516 more than the man with the third-best aggregate – Brendon McCullum (485).

The leading English six-hitter, Eoin Morgan (318), has not even managed one-third of Gayle’s ‘ginormous’ total.

Gayle has hit 10 or more sixes in a T20 match 18 times (no-one else has done it more than three times) and he holds the record for the most sixes in a T20 innings – 18 for Rangpur Riders against Dhaka Dynamites in the final of the 2017 Bangladesh Premier League.

Gayle also holds the record for the highest individual T20 innings – 175 not out for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Pune Warriors in Bangalore in the 2013 IPL, when he reached his hundred from just 30 balls – another record.

Gayle has hit more T20 runs than anybody else – 13,584, with Pollard once more in second position, all of 3,109 runs behind.

Most staggering of all, perhaps, Gayle has hit more sixes than any international team, let alone any other player, clearing the rope so often that T20 must feel to him like money for old rope.

To list the teams/franchises for whom Gayle has blazed a trail in T20 is to go through the gamut of countries and continents.

For the record, they are, in alphabetical sequence: Balkh Legends, Barisal Bulls, Barisal Burners, Chattogram Challengers, Chittagong Vikings, Dhaka Gladiators, Jamaica, Jamaica Tallawahs, Jozi Stars, Karachi Kings, Kings XI Punjab, Kolkata Knight Riders, Lahore Qalandars, Lions, Matabeleland Tuskers, Melbourne Renegades, PCA Masters XI, Rangpur Riders, Royal Challengers Bangalore, Somerset, Stanford Superstars, St Kitts and Nevis Patriots, Sydney Thunder, Western Australia and West Indies.

When you contemplate that lot, Gayle must have almost as many stamps in his passport as Michael Palin en route to not so much the Life of Brian, indeed, as the life of Riley, considering the riches that go with T20.

Small wonder that the T20 franchises have thrown the big bucks at Gayle to the extent that he has gone from an extremely poor upbringing in Jamaica (five-to-a-room in downtown Kingston) to a nine-bedroom mansion complete with its own strip club.

“If you ain’t got a strip club at home, you ain’t a true cricket player,” Gayle famously explained, his appetite for the opposite sex matched only by his appetite for runs.

Given that he is, let’s face it, a somewhat preposterous figure (who the hell has a strip club in their house?), it is easy to think of Gayle as just a six-hitting party animal with not a huge amount going on upstairs. But behind the bling, the sunglasses and the pearl-white teeth, and the controversies that famously included some ill-judged remarks towards the Australian television reporter Mel McLaughlin at a Big Bash tournament, there is more to the man and the player than sometimes meets the eye.

For the coolest cricketer in the world – we can at least give him that – can be shy and reserved (sometimes), kind and considerate, and it is certainly wrong to think of him as just a T20 gun for hire, one of the founding fathers, indeed, of the modern game.

Gayle played 103 Test matches (average 42) and 301 one-day internationals (average 37).

He is one of just four men to have scored two Test match triple centuries, the others being Brian Lara, Don Bradman and Virender Sehwag.

By any standard, Gayle – still going strong at the grand old age of 41, albeit running even fewer quick singles than usual these days – deserves to be regarded as one of the finest and most versatile players of his era.

He has done the business in all forms of cricket over a consistent period of time, and it is only because of the laddish perception of him, perhaps, and the peripheral nonsense, that denies him the credit his track record merits.

“I’m disappointed people don’t recognise what I did in Test cricket,” he once said.

“For an opening batsman to get two triple centuries? A lot of greats haven’t got one.

“So to have those achievements dismissed and just be the king of T20 cricket?

“It’s good to be called the king of something, but to have the most hundreds in ODI cricket for the West Indies?

“I’ve played 100 Test matches. I should get credit for that.”

It is refreshing, in an era when T20 is indeed king and Gayle the ‘Universe Boss’ of all it surveys, that he clearly puts such store by what he achieved in the five-day game.

To put Gayle’s Test record into some sort of context, he averaged only five runs less than Geoffrey Boycott and scored seven fewer hundreds than he did in a career that spanned five fewer games.

It is the hallmark, no less, of a “proper” batsman, one who could not have scored the number of sixes that he has without a solid foundation at the crease.

To bowl at Gayle must be one of the most demoralising experiences that a bowler can have; the left-hander can strike through the line with phenomenal power and seize instantly on anything short or wide. There is no real safe area for a bowler to target.

Of course, anyone who goes around calling himself the ‘Universe Boss’ must either have astronomical delusions of grandeur or else confidence and chutzpah of remarkable proportions.

In his early days, Gayle settled for the less expansive ‘World Boss’, although he has been known to trot out the term ‘Multiverse Boss’. Yeah, we get the message, big man...

Gayle is a frankly comical character – someone with tongue wedged firmly in cheek (at least one hopes so).

Whenever I think of him, I can’t help but smile to myself and reflect that, for all of the shenanigans that surrounds the ‘Six Machine’, he is one of the most talented batsmen that cricket has seen.

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