Understated, and underrated, til the last

If the most authoritative of contrasting media reports are to be believed and the Test career of Shivnarine Chanderpaul has indeed been curtailed, then cricket is losing one of its most endearing and enduring links to its uncomplicated, poignant past.

As the last remaining Test player from the mid-1990s when the West Indies’ crown as cricket’s unstoppable force was slipping but still defiantly intact, Chanderpaul’s remarkable career carries far greater gravitas than symbolism alone.

From 164 Test appearances – the most in a West Indies cap – the impossibly slight left-hander sits just 46 runs adrift of Brian Lara as the West Indies’ greatest-ever Test runs scorer.

To get there, the understated and almost-as-often underrated Chanderpaul overtook legends of that glorious past Sir Vivian Richards, Sir Garfield Sobers and Gordon Greenidge.

As well as Clive Lloyd, a Guyanese compatriot who – as the West Indies Cricket Board’s Convenor of Selectors – yesterday oversaw Chanderpaul’s exclusion from the Test squad to tackle Australia in next month’s two-Test series in the Caribbean.

“We want to take this opportunity to introduce a number of young, promising players into the squad,” Lloyd said in an official statement.

Which would indicate the 40-year-old with a batting technique most politely described as ‘individual’ and many an on-field idiosyncracy to accompany it has now – rather like that epoch when West Indies cricket was a euphemism for uncompromising excellence – been consigned to the past.

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Chanderpaul as a 22-year-old in Sydney, 1996 // Getty Images

But if this is to be the end, then not only will Chanderpaul’s extraordinary productivity and longevity be recorded in statistical detail – the path he travelled to get there will remain etched into the modern game’s most beloved folklore.

He was born, raised and taught cricket in Unity, a fishing village of around 2,000 people at the mouth of the Mahaica River an hour’s drive south-east of Guyana’s capital Georgetown along a neglected stretch of road that skirts the South American coast and is lined by dense vegetation and the occasional ambling caiman.  

The son of a fisherman, Chanderpaul left school at 13 with his eyes fixed on following other Guyanese batting heroes Lloyd, Rohan Kanhai, Roy Fredericks and Alvin Kallicharan into the team of uneasily affiliated Caribbean nations that stand unified in cricket alone as the West Indies.

Even before adolescence, Chanderpaul had learned painful lessons about the game that was his passion.

As an eight-year-old, he had been fitted out with a rudimentary kit pulled together by his father Khemraj – cut-down canvas and bamboo pads, protective cloths tied around his hands and chest, a patched-up bat with a makeshift bamboo handle – and sent to war.

On a shiny concrete strip made slicker with a sheen of water, his dad would pitch ‘concrete balls’ – the hard, cork spheres that form the leather-encased core of cricket balls – at young Shivnarine who evaded, fended and counter-attacked as best he was able.

When he failed to evade, he would spend the evenings soaking his bruises in warm water before facing up again the next day.

There were variations to the routine.

Tennis balls stripped of their ‘fur’ that were soaked in water and pitched at high velocity.

Compressed rubber balls deployed in shoreline matches where the rippled sand and ebbing water ensured they flew and skewed with an unpredictable menace born of the predators of the time – Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner and Colin Croft, the latter of whom was a product of Unity’s neighbouring village, Lancaster.

Indeed, these were the days when seemingly every Caribbean community boasted a snarling six-foot-seven quick and it was as a 10-year-old tailender playing for Demarara’s under-19 team that Chanderpaul came up against one of them – Malteenoes’ Colwin Cort.

Seven years older and several times taller than the skinny kid who wore a pillow under his shirt as a chest protector, Cort – who went on to play two first-class matches for Guyana – flung everything at Chanderpaul who survived nine torrid overs and emerged with the first of countless unbeaten innings.

The value that Chanderpaul has placed upon his wicket and his person has led to criticism over the course of his 21-year Test career that he could be a “selfish” batsman reluctant to rise above number five in the order and who left tailenders to fend for themselves rather than farm the strike.

It’s a critique that would resonate strongly with Stephen Waugh, who was often similarly maligned.

But the counter view is that in the early stages of his career Chanderpaul was the steady foil to free-wheeling stroke makers ahead of him such as Desmond Haynes, Richie Richardson, Brian Lara and Carl Hooper.

Then, in the leaner, latter years he was more usually than not needed to shore up a top-order calamity and the fact that he faced a record 1,051 deliveries (more than 175 overs) without surrendering his wicket in a 2002 series against India suggests skill rather than self-indulgence.

He also, in his earlier years, wore the tag of ‘soft’ or ‘hypochondriac’ due to regular injury absences from international matches, although if that were true he would probably not have made his Test debut as a replacement for current West Indies’ coach Phil Simmons against England in 1994.

The urgent posse sent down the Guyanese coast to find him when he was drafted into the Test XI just days before the match found him hobbling on the Unity beach after a discarded fish bone or nail had speared him during a bare-foot cricket game.

But he told nobody and limped through his debut, scoring a half-century that triggered a pitch invasion of delirious local fans.

Certainly any witnesses to the sickening blow to the base of helmet Chanderpaul wore when failing to duck under a Brett Lee bouncer in Jamaica six years ago would also recall that he declined the stretcher rushed out to him, and instead set about completing his 18th Test century.

And those – including Lara himself who once castigated Chanderpaul during a Test match break for his inability to score off India’s Harbhajan Singh – who decried Chanderpaul’s sometimes stodgy approach to batting, weren’t in the heaving stands at Georgetown’s Bourda Ground in 2003.

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Celebrating a stunning 69-ball century against Australia in 2003 // Getty Images

That was when Chanderpaul came to the crease on the opening morning of the first Test against Australia with the West Indies listing badly at 4-47 (soon 5-53 when Lara perished) and responded to the predicament by belting what was then the third-fastest Test century recorded (off 69 balls).

“That was just one of those days,” Chanderpaul recalled in a rare interview years later. “Every time I hit the ball it just went through the gap, went to the boundary.”

But in a thumbnail sketch of his cricket life, Chanderpaul’s unexpected high was countered by another public relations low when he was a last-minute withdrawal from the next week’s second Test with what was officially deemed a knee injury, though rumours abounded of dispute with West Indies authorities.

It was one of those all-too-common upheavals that landed Chanderpaul the Test captaincy the following year when Lara and eight of his teammates were dropped amidst a sponsorship row, but leadership was a responsibility that never sat comfortably with the shy, introspective batsman.

He then handed it back to Lara (albeit briefly) after a year in the job, citing a slump in his own form, sleepless nights and escalating anxiety, none of which was aided by his team’s stark and irrevocable decline that saw him preside over a solitary win from 14 Tests in charge.

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Brian Lara and Chanderpaul both struggled with the West Indies captaincy // Getty Images

“As a captain you have more responsibilities, you have to say more things, you have to be more open, you can’t be quiet, you have to try and get involved in everything,” Chanderpaul later lamented.

“At times it can stress you out, doing these things over and over.”

Aside from scoring runs, there are other acts of repetition for which Chanderpaul will remain rightly remembered.

That ungainly front-on stance that has evolved during his career not so much as a throwback to the days of self-preservation in Unity but a need to feel more sure-footed at the crease and reduce (in his own mind) the likelihood of him falling over as he manoeuvres towards and away from the ball.

The glare-reducing patches he began fixing beneath his eyes in response to the harsh light in Florida where he has lived for years, and which he initially bought at an over-the-counter pharmacist before being told the visible manufacturers’ name would need to be replaced with that of an approved WICB sponsor.

The simple act of kissing the pitch upon reaching a Test hundred, a moment he has now savoured more times than did Sir Donald Bradman.

And the insistence of marking his guard at the start of each innings by removing one of the bails and hammering it into the pitch surface with the handle of his bat, a method since employed by a number of other West Indian batsmen.

But even though Chanderpaul has defied age and sporting wisdom by proving more productive in the last phase of his career than in his pomp (he has averaged 57.74 in Tests since turning 35 compared to 52.28 in the decade prior) recent results have proved elusive.

In his two most recent Test series (against South Africa and England) Chanderpaul has scored 183 runs from 11 outings at an average of 16.63 with a high watermark of 50.

Perhaps it’s a glimpse that under new coach Simmons the West Indies players will become more accountable in a bid to try and narrow some of the gap that has opened up between the euphoric past and last year’s shambolic tour of India.

Whatever the back story, it appears the chance for one final home appearance along with an opportunity to break Lara’s record will not be afforded the West Indies’ longest-serving Test player.

If that’s the case, don’t expect Chanderpaul to race to print with a scathing tell-all book that tips a bucket and ensures he will never again don the Caribbean cap.

“I'm a private person," he once explained. “I'm reserved, not outgoing, I don't trouble anybody.

“I had some bad experiences with (media) interviews, I said something and they changed it up and made it look bad so after a while I decided ‘to hell with it’."

And while he is likely to be lost to the West Indies as he continues his involvement with the American College Cricket competition that he has developed since shifting to mainland USA, it seems the Chanderpaul name will be seen for some time on scoreboards in the Caribbean and possibly beyond.

His son Tagenarine (‘Brandon’) Chanderpaul who turns 19 next week is currently making his way as a left-handed opener with Guyana’s first-class team that his dad made his debut with as an unassuming, unflinching 17-year-old in 1991.

Back when the West Indies were kings of the world.