Ricky Ponting hails Chris Gayle's 10,000 landmark as a fantastic achievement

Chris Gayle announced his return to form with a whirlwind knock of 77 off just 38 balls which led RCB to their second win of the season – a 21-run against the Gujarat Lions at Rajkot on Tuesday. In the process, he became the first ever cricketer to go past 10,000 T20 runs, a feat which was once unthinkable.

Former Australia captain Ricky Ponting praised the Jamaican’s latest achievement and said that it is a fantastic achievement. Ponting emphasised the value of Gayle across formats. The 37-year old, who last played a Test match in September 2014, has two triple hundreds to his name. He is one of only 4 people who has managed to go past 300 twice in their Test careers, the other three being Sir Don Bradman, Brian Lara and Virender Sehwag. Gayle last played an ODI in the ICC World Cup 2015, where he recorded a double century and became the first West Indian to do so.

“He’ll hang his hat on that, as he should,” Ponting told cricket.com.au on Wednesday (April 19). “He’s played more T20 cricket in the last five or six years than he has other forms of the game, but he’s dominated the game pretty much everywhere he’s been. Congratulations to him, it’s a fantastic achievement.”

“The man has got a Test triple-hundred as well so it hasn’t always been just about T20 cricket,” said Ponting. “He’s got a pretty good one-day record and we probably forget about how much Test cricket he played – he’s played 100 Tests. He’s played a lot of cricket and there’s probably a lot of negativity around about him probably not playing as much Test cricket for the West Indies as a lot of people would have liked, but at the end of the day he’s had a long and distinguished career and when he’s finished he’ll be pretty happy with it.”

Gayle has been sensational in T20 cricket and has reserved his best for the IPL. In 96 games, he has recorded 3563 runs at an average of 42.92 and a strike rate of 153 – both higher than his career numbers. He has scored 5 hundreds – the most by anyone in the history of the IPL. The left-hander is a murdered of spin bowling and can be vulnerable against pace if bowled wider of the stumps or into the body, something which Ponting agreed to.

“Some of the things we would do with him at Mumbai, while he was in we would just bowl our fastest bowlers until he got out. We weren’t going to bowl spin at him,” said Ponting. “We’d have (Mitchell) Johnson, we’d have (Lasith) Malinga, (Mitchell) McClenaghan; we’d have all three going for as long as it took to get him out.

“Because as soon as you expose spin to him, you can guarantee that the first over is going for 20-plus. That’s just the way he plays. And he’d target those spinners; he’d block Malinga’s first two or three overs, not even look to score, and wait for the spin to come on. So we’d try and drag that out and get lots of dot balls on him when we could with our fast bowlers and make it harder for him to end up striking at 300. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And more often than not during his career, he’s had the better of most teams that he’s played against.”

Gayle has had an illustrious career in the slam-bang version of the game, a format he has played the most in the last 4-5 years. With almost every record in T20 cricket against his name, the man from the Caribbean looks good for a few more runs. His return to form is good news for RCB who are in the process of resurrecting their IPL campaign.