The backstop: Bravo! Dwayne has the last laugh

“Let’s see where you are in three years Dwayne.” YouTube loves sledging clips, albeit quite a large percentage seem to simply involve being angry in the comments about the perceived disrespecting of Virat Kohli.

There’s a good one from 2004: Andrew Flintoff v Dwayne Bravo, England v West Indies at Lord’s. Flintoff is batting, Bravo fielding at cover. It is an exchange that has come over time to seem increasingly out of kilter. 

Flintoff was in his pre-pomp at that moment, on the rise, and brutally certain of himself. Bravo was playing his first Test series. No doubt there was “a bit flying around”. In this clip Flintoff starts on at Bravo, telling him that he’s basically just passing through, a lightweight, a fancy boy. 

“Let’s see where you are Dwayne. Because I’ve seen what this game can do and it will bite you on the arse… I bet you won’t be here.” In the footage Bravo just kind of grins and nods, looking a bit thrown. 

It is interesting to remember what happened next. Because Flintoff was right about the game, but wrong about whose arse it had in its sights in that snapshot of time. Three years later it was instead Flintoff who was nowhere to be seen as West Indies returned, already and in the grip of his own long and painful endgame. 

Whereas Dwayne was back, averaging 41 with the bat across four Tests in England. And a full 14 years on Bravo has this month announced a kind of international retirement as one of the most garlanded, durable and indeed well-remunerated cricketers of the modern age.

Flintoff was right in other ways. Bravo’s career from that point would not be a business of standing around in white clothes being talked down to by Englishmen. It lay instead with entities that had yet to be invented, with Chennai Super Kings, Comilla Warriors, Dhaka Dynamites, Chittagong Kings, Gujarat Lions, Lahore Qalandars, Melbourne Renegades, Melbourne Stars. Mumbai Indians, Paarl Rocks, Quetta Gladiators, Sydney Sixers, Trinibago Knight Riders and Winnipeg Hawks, with the Maratha Arabians. Put a coloured shirt on it, sound the trumpets, and Dwayne will be there, helping you win.

My favourite cricketer: Mark Ramprakash

He has been a brilliant cricketer too, albeit not in a way that would have made much sense in 2004. Look at the old metrics, and the only skill Bravo seems to have been unarguably good at is ODI bowling, where he has 199 wickets at 29.52. He scored three Test hundreds, and averaged the same as Flintoff. That world might have opened up for him had the structure of West Indies cricket been less flaky.

It seems oddly fitting that what Bravo announced during the recent T20 series against Pakistan was his retirement from playing for West Indies at home – leaving the chance of a World Cup finale, but also flagging incidentally the weird relationship of board and players during his time. 

Bravo has instead improvised among the franchises, followed the tides of the game, refining his own talent to fit. He has been a key man in two West Indies T20 World Cup wins, and right now has the longest career (15-year) of any player in T20 internationals. But the really key numbers are 490 T20 games, 6,429 T20 runs, 532 T20 wickets.

Above all he has been that cricketer so many teams want, the free radical, the ‘moment’ player, there to play and win the big points. Bravo is your two dot balls to win the game, that back-to-back boundaries that alter the flow, the gleeful loft over cover, all high elbow, the balletic finish, the ball sent gloriously high towards some seething stand. 

Even late Dwayne, wearing a slightly larger shirt, has that uncanny picture in his head of what his opponent is about to do. And nobody ever got the hang of that slower ball, a weird, floating, dipping thing, propelled out of some mystery part of the hand.

Every nation wants one of these. He’s like a good Curran brother, or one of those Aussie beefcake T20 allrounders that (who?) doesn’t seem weirdly stiff and doomed. He can still do it too. He smashed Australia around the Daren Sammy Cricket Ground in July, and took four wickets in 11 balls against South Africa a few weeks before. 

Adapt and survive: Bravo has lived those new forms, adapted his talents, shaped the game, become a kind of DIY Bravo. Rewind to 2004 and it is instead Flintoff who misunderstood what cricket would become – and who would, I have no doubt, be the first to applaud Bravo for a wonderful career as both entertainer and indomitable survivor.

This article was published in the Summer edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game