Chris Gayle has responded to the criticism he received from fellow cricketers following his sexist comments during a live interview in last season’s Big Bash League with Andrew Flintoff, Chris Rogers and Ian Chappell all coming under fire in an extract from his new autobiography.
Despite the controversy that ensued, Gayle remains unrepentant five months down the line.
“Now T20 is different,” he writes, in a serialised extract of his book Six Machine, published in the Times.
As Gayle noted, Network Ten’s commentary team could be heard laughing on air after the incident.
“But someone up above them clearly decided to step in, and a throwaway comment in a fun format escalates and blows up and within hours it has turned into a major international incident,” he wrote.
Among the most scathing critics of his actions was Rogers, the former Australia opening batsman who is also a team-mate of Gayle’s at Somerset. Speaking on an ABC radio show shortly after the incident, Rogers accused Gayle of setting a bad example for his younger team-mates, adding that his was a “pattern of behaviour … [that] you see over and over”.
In response, however, Gayle insinuated that Rogers was a hypocrite, and had acted more like “Roger Rabbit”.
As for Flintoff, who wrote on Twitter after the McLaughlin incident that Gayle had made himself look a bit of a “chop”, Gayle suggested – slightly bizarrely – that his criticisms were invalidated because of Flintoff’s own admission, in an interview last year, that he had once been run out in a Test match after taking Viagra.
Chappell, who had called for Gayle to face a world-wide ban following his comments, also came in for a rebuke.
Gayle, who is due to play for Somerset again this season in the NatWest T20 Blast, had sparked another sexism row earlier this week when he asked a Times journalist, Charlotte Edwardes, a string of inappropriate questions, including how many black men she has “had” and whether she had ever engaged in a “t’eesome”, while also claiming he had “the biggest bat in the wooooorld”.
However, Somerset dismissed any suggestion that they will renege on their six-game deal with Gayle as a consequence of his comments.
“I was disappointed to read the article,” Guy Lavender, the Somerset chief executive, told theObserver. “But as I’ve said before, we found him to be fantastic the last time he was here, in terms of activities both on and off the pitch.