- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
In January, Marlon Samuels was the butt of every cricketing joke in Australia. In April, he provided a standout gutsy performance which made the West Indies Twenty20 world champions.
It may be the greatest villain to hero turnaround the sport has seen, but that’s the complexity of Marlon Samuels.
Everything Samuels appears to be 95 per cent of the time – uninterested, lacking intensity, soft, individualistic and susceptible to any pressure – is everything Samuels wasn’t when he held the West Indies together in the World T20 Final. Sorry, make that everything Samuels hasn’t been in two World T20 Finals. This is not a one-off.
In the absence of a Test World Championship, and with the four-year cycle of the Cricket World Cup, the biannual World T20 decider is the closest thing to a regular grand final of world cricket.
It’s those who are most dedicated, most hungry, most professional and play with an unfailing consistency and intensity who are supposed to be impervious to pressure in finals situations. They are the ones we admire and respect most. The ones that rivals speak about with reverence.
Everything we see of Samuels is the opposite. Samuels is the most maligned player in international cricket; journalists and players alike do not speak glowingly about him. Players who are flaky are the first to let you down on the big stage, yet Samuels owns two of this generation’s most clutch performances.
So what do we make of this confounding personality, someone who has somehow found his way into every type of cricket controversy imaginable.
Match-fixing? Yes, a 2-year ban.
Chucking? Yes, repeatedly.
Pay disputes? Of course.
On-field spats? There have been a few of those.
An ongoing feud with a legendary figure? Warne v Samuels is now reaching Chappelli v Botham proportions.
Resilience is the last word you’d hear associated with Samuels, but, 16 years on from taking on Australia as a teenager, he’s still somehow playing international cricket. Any one of those rap sheet charges was expected to finish him, particularly when his record stood at 29 Tests and just two centuries in eight years at the time of his ban for passing on information to bookmakers.
Despite being the perennial villain, Samuels has stuck with Test cricket. In a pressure chase where the West Indies T20 guns for hire failed with the bat, it was the Test players Samuels and Brathwaite who resurrected the chase and completed the heist.
Samuels was the only player in the West Indian team who could have played that innings. A genuine crossover cricket innings – a T20 caveat doesn’t diminish it as it took as onerous a tactical and mental application as a long Test innings would.
So how come Samuels seemed so pathetic in three Tests against Australia last summer, but produced a gutsy innings that won a world cup?
The pressure is off in T20s, I hear traditionalists say. But human nature would say a billion eyeballs and a packed stadium is more pressure than a few thousand people in Hobart.
Only Samuels could know, but I doubt he does.
Samuels’ legacy is destined be the great example of wasted potential, a problem child of West Indies cricket who never got anywhere near enough out of his talent.
That’s not likely to change from an Australian perspective, but how many players in any sport can say they carried their team to victory twice in world competition finals? It’s the type of effort that makes a cricketer’s cricketer, but Samuels won’t ever be described as a world-beater.
In true Samuels fashion he almost sabotaged the glow by taking the opportunity to fire at Shane Warne post-match. This sums up the inherent conflict of Samuels; even in his brightest moment, there was a darkness.
This performance only deepens the mystery of Marlon. For future generations, the Samuels that appears in the history books will be just as confounding as the one we’ve shaken our heads at for the last 16 years.
Build your own fantasy cricket team and put it to the test with Draftstars daily fantasy competitions. Pick your match, pick your team and watch the points roll in to take out cash prizes on each match. What are you really gambling with? Set a deposit limit.