Bravo, Bravo

ON Thursday, September 26, Dwayne Bravo announced his retirement from cricket entirely at the end of this Caribbean Premier League series.

"Today," he wrote on his Instagram page, "is the day I say goodbye to the game that has given me everything."

The pressures of competitive cricket had taken its toll.

"My body can no longer endure the pain, the breakdowns, and the strain," he explained.

A muscle strain in 2006 took him out of part of the Twenty20 tour and in 2020, he suffered a groin injury that sidelined him for the remainder of that year’s Indian Premier League (IPL).

In 2015, he announced his retirement from test cricket and in 2021 from international cricket for the West Indies. This week he bid farewell to league T20 matches.

Over the course of his career, Mr Bravo has played for 43 different cricket teams.

He made his debut in first-class cricket representing TT against Barbados in 2002. He played his first Test match in 2004.

He would go on to play 40 Test matches in his career, 164 one-day internationals (ODI) and 91 T20 matches for the West Indies.

Annoyed with the WICB, he pulled the Caribbean team out of a ODI tour of India and was fired as captain and blacklisted from that game thereafter.

In franchise league cricket, the IPL and CPL, that Bravo found his length as a talented cricketer and irrepressible character on the field.

On his retirement, Mr Bravo held the record for the most wickets taken for the West Indies in T20 internationals (78), wickets taken in T20s (631), and holds a top five rank for the most appearances (582), most balls bowled (11,183) and most catches (275).

He is the only player in the T20 format to take more than 500 wickets and score more than 5,000 runs.

But cricket wasn’t Mr Bravo’s only passion. In 2012, he debuted his song Champion, and since 2020 has considered himself fully involved in the music industry, creating a music studio, and launching the 47 Riddim in 2022.

The cricketer/singer has gone on to release dozens of songs, several racking up more than a million views on his YouTube channel.

But cricket and its wiser investors seem determined to keep this talented cricketer near the pitch. Directly after his retirement announcement, he was named mentor of the Kolkata Knight Riders, the owners of the franchise clearly wanting to hold onto a good thing.

Piers Morgan may say some controversial things, but he got Dwayne Bravo right in this tweet after his departure from international cricket, "The greatest entertainer in the history of world cricket bows out. What a batsman, what a character, what an irrepressible life force."