Shivnarine Chanderpaul

The West Indies’ tour to South Africa during the summer (well, that’s summer for us down here in the south) of 1998 was the first time that I started taking "note" of Shivnarine Chanderpaul as a player.

The visitors were woeful from start to finish, getting whitewashed 5-0 in the Test series and getting a 6-1 drubbing in the one-dayers.

For a while there had been murmurs that all was not well in the Caribbean, but things weren’t going too bad as they came off a 3-1 series victory over England at home and they still had three of the best cricketers in their squad in Brian Lara, Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose. But once the tour came to an end everyone realised that something serious was wrong with cricket in the West Indies and there were only one or two shining lights in their team.

Lara was rightly considered the big fish for South Africa’s bowlers as he was one of the few players in Test cricket who can single-handedly take a game away from the opposition in an hour or so, but the wicket of Shivnarine Chanderpaul was probably the most precious as you knew that once Chanderpaul was gone the Fat Lady was starting to clear her throat.

That tour will hardly go down as one of his finest - after all he scored only two fifties and averaged a meagre 26.60 in his five Test matches. It went a little better in the limited-overs games where he reached three figures once for an average of 46.85.

However, on the few occasions that the visitors’ batsmen managed to win a session you’d always find Chanderpaul was batting. Lara received the plaudits as he had that "wow" factor, but Chanderpaul was the ultimate team player. When your team is in trouble (as is often the case for the Windies) then you’d want the diminutive Guyanan to come in next. Guess who was at the other end when Lara scored 365 not out against England in 1994?

It is not surprising that the only time the West Indies managed to win against South Africa on that tour was when Chanderpaul scored a century in the second one-dayer. He certainly left a lasting impression on me during that series.

Almost 10 years on from that series and not much has changed. He still has that awkward stance and a technique that you won’t find in the coaching manuals, yet he continues to go from strength to strength. He still carries the West Indies’ batting attack and is more often than not the last man standing. If they do manage to win a game my first thought is always "Chanderpaul must’ve scored some big runs".

It is no surprise that Chanderpaul is one of only a handful of Test players to have gone 1000 minutes without losing his wicket. In fact he is the only player to have done so on more than one occasion.

He is considered by many to be better suited to Test cricket, but his average of 40.49 shows that he is no mug when it comes to the one-day game. He showed during the first one-dayer against Sri Lanka in Port of Spain earlier this year that he can also provide the fireworks when needed. With 10 runs required from the final two balls you would want an Andrew Flintoff, Yuvraj Singh or Lance Klusener facing. But cometh the hour, cometh the man and Chanderpaul smashed the penultimate ball through mid-off for four and then scored the winning six over deep midwicket.