Cricketer Chris Gayle has long since been a fella who thinks with his middle stump rather than his brain.
His Instagram account suggests he has enjoyed as many dalliances as he’s had career runs (we’re talking thousands here), many of them possibly taking place under the mirrored ceiling in his bedroom that he regularly photographs (“hanky panky bed!”).
When he installed a strip club in his home he advised his followers that “u ain’t a cricket ‘player’” unless you had one (“#DreamBig,” he said), while his relationship advice to his fans on Twitter was: “Play with her boobs not her feelings.”
That’s him, then. You knew you should never have chuckled, but it was a challenge not to.
Hanky panky bed
Alas, as we discovered this week, he appears to be under the impression that every women he meets in the course of his working life, and not just when he’s partying, craves nothing more than to share his hanky panky bed. (He’s 36, not 13).
And he has a bit of a track record, as we learned after he’d acted like a dick when interviewed on Australian television, Mel McLaughlin not the first female reporter to have her cricketing query ignored, instead finding herself propositioned on live TV. “Don’t blush baby,” he said when she looked a touch taken aback.
For that he earned himself a fine of Aus$10,000 (about €6,500) and if he was stricken with remorse he hid it well, posting a photo of himself on Instagram a day later wearing a T-shirt that read "Sex Sells" with the caption "Pockets are empty . . . so Dwayne Bravo [his team-mate] paying the dinner bill tonight . . . Let's roll".
Self-awareness is not Gayle's thing. There's as much chance of him learning anything from this as there is of him reading The Female Eunuch.
He’d moved on, then. Which is what McLaughlin asked everyone to do after describing Gayle’s behaviour as “disappointing”, and for that her Twitter mentions filled up with messages along the lines of: “You self entitled prissy little bitch”; “U ****ing whore be great ful anyone wants to take you”; “Hope a cricket ball smashes into your head while your so called reporting...you dumb bitch!”; “Diva reporter who wants her 15 minutes of fame. Wake up and pull your big head out of your ass you ****in bitch!”; “****ing sooky little bitch, f**k feminism #standbygayle”.
Sprinkling of defenders
And they were the polite ones. If McLaughlin had “played” along, they’d have been calling her a slapper.
But Gayle had a sprinkling of defenders in the media too, including Piers Morgan.(By their friends ye shall know them) Charlotte Gill in the UK Independent, writing with all the subtlety of a Katie Hopkins tweet, wanted to give the player "a big hug" because all he was doing was asking McLaughlin on a date, and any way "women get away with complimenting men all the time". Sometimes you don't know where to start, so it's best not to even try.
Cricket writer Fizzier Mohammed, meanwhile, suggested that McLaughlin’s employers, Ten Sport, were at fault for “putting their reporter in line for that sort of treatment” when they must have known Gayle’s reputation. No really, he said that.
Gayle should only be interviewed by lads so he won’t be provoked in to being a pillock.
And Ten Sport were left blushing themselves after they initially described Gayle as "smooth" in a tweet they hastily deleted, while their commentators were too busy giggling at the time to notice their colleague's discomfort. A message must have been speedily sent to the box, Mark Howard then criticising the 'smooth' one while Damien Fleming and Mark Waugh looked puzzled. 'Strewth, the Sheila should have been flattered,' they were possibly thinking.
In the end, really, the people defending Chris Gayle were way worse than Chris Gayle. If he could be restricted to communicating with the outside world through his Instagram account, that’d be good.
McLaughlin, meanwhile, just wants to get on with her work. “I love my job and I’d just rather be talking about that,” she said. And that’s all we should really want for women like her, that they can get on with their bloody jobs without some of the men they work with displaying all the maturity of a Chris Gayle. We can but #DreamBig.
