Gayle BBL controversy ‘a bit of a beat-up’: Saker

MELBOURNE: Chris Gayle could yet return to the Melbourne Renegades next summer, after the team’s coach David Saker described the controversy surrounding his sideline interview with broadcaster Mel McLaughlin as “a bit of a beat-up”.

Gayle sparked outrage in January when he used a mid-match interview to ask McLaughlin out and told her “don’t blush, baby”, which Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland at the time described as “borderline harassment”. The Melbourne Renegades fined Gayle $10,000 but stopped short of suspending him over the incident.

Sutherland said last month that Cricket Australia was unlikely to ban clubs from signing Gayle for next summer’s BBL, although it still appeared unlikely he would return to the competition in any case. Saker said that while Gayle’s conduct was wrong, it would not be cause not to sign him again if the Renegades decided he would help their chances of winning the title.

“That doesn’t enter my mind,” Saker told the Age. “I just pick a squad of players. If the hierarchies or people in higher positions than myself come down on that, they do. All I try to do is pick a squad to win.

“We know it was the wrong thing to do and he probably identified that quite quickly. We all did. But I think what happened afterwards was a bit of a beat-up. We really want women in sport and I think in Australia we’re embracing that quite well. Mel does a fantastic job with what she does. We know it was wrong, but a lot of people put their two bobs-worth in that probably didn’t need to.”

Saker said he was not aware of any directive, either official or unofficial, from Cricket Australia declaring that Gayle was persona-non-grata in the BBL.

“Not to me. It might have come to our CEO, but not that I know of and I don’t think that would happen,” Saker said. “It was the wrong thing to do, but it’s not the end of the world, I wouldn’t have thought.”

Despite Saker’s comments, it remains to be seen whether the Renegades would want to re-sign Gayle from a pure cricket point of view. Last summer he scored 260 runs at 32.50 and managed just one half-century from his eight appearances. Saker foreshadowed his team needing an overseas bowler, although he said it was still possible they could sign Gayle again.

“There’s still a chance of that,” he said. “To be fair we probably need an overseas bowler though. We’re looking at whether to go down that track or to recruit a bowler from inside Australia. So we’re going through whether we need to re-sign Chris Gayle.”