Gayle’s just a target to sell newspapers, says Darren Sammy

West Indies T20 skipper Darren Sammy has defended his compatriot Chris Gayle after his latest allegations of sexism and believes the belligerent batsman has become a target for headline writers.

“Gayle is an entertainer. Too much is expected of him. He’s my team-mate and I have a lot of respect for him. Gayle is just a target to sell newspapers, especially now. You have people coming to him and asking him those sorts of questions knowing what the answer will be,” Sammy told the Independent on Thursdsay.

He went on to add: “Cricket needs people like him, that’s why he is the World Boss, sorry, the Universe Boss! He’s an entertainer. A lot of us see the outside of Chris and don’t know the man himself. You need to take the time to discover the history of where he has come from, where most of our cricketers in the Caribbean have come from. They’ve come from nothing.”

Gayle made a string of lewd and sexist comments in an interview to the Times, boasting that he had “the biggest bat in the wooooorld,” and saw it fit to ask the interviewer “how many black men she had slept with”.

Sammy pointed to the heart scare and consequent surgery Gayle underwent 11 years ago as one of the key turning points in his life.

Gayle suffered an irregular heartbeat in the Second Test between the West Indies and Australia in Hobart in November 2005.

He retired hurt and went under the knife in Melbourne just days later.

“Chris decided on his life when his heart almost stopped on him,” says Sammy.

“He decided he was going to enjoy every single day of his life. From then on, he decided that every day from that day on he was going to enjoy life to the full.”

Sammy’s side won the T20 World Cup final in Kolkata from a seemingly impossible situation to provide a massive shot in the arm for cricket in the Caribbean. Recollecting the last over in which Carlos Brathwaite struck four sixes, Sammy said: “What was I thinking in that over I was saying that we needed three sixes. Everybody was saying ‘damn, we need three sixes’. In the end we didn’t get three, we got four. It was one of those moments that will always go down in history.”