Shai Hope- the carrier of West Indian hopes who’ll drive Caribbean cricket forward

Most questions concerning Shai Hope on Google’s opening page read something like this:

How tall is Shai Hope? How old is Shai Hope? 

Maybe what’s most interesting to ask is how tall is Shai Hope’s ambition. Though, we aren’t even asking that question. 

The answer, however, would be immeasurable. 

Wondering why? How do you measure the length of something for which there’s no scale anywhere in the world? 

Most of us remember Shai Hope as being the batsman who scored a hundred in his fiftieth one-day international. 

That was something. No lame feat. 

Then came that big moment at the Queen’s Park Oval, the home ground of Hope’s boyhood batting idol: the Prince of Trinidad Brian Lara. 

Shai Hope struck that magnificent 115 just hours ago but ended up on the wrong side of the result. 

A moment to savour despite the despair of defeat. 

Yet, there was something about the century that stood out; Hope became only the fourth West Indian batsman and the twelfth in all, to strike a century in his hundredth ODI. 

To belong to a list to which even Lara doesn’t belong must have been special.  

But while we remember these milestones in his 50th and hundredth game, what we don’t quite recollect is that Shai Hope was amongst the runs right from the word go. 

In 2016, when the likes of Daryl Mitchell hadn’t yet become permanent fixtures, Faf was yet to be appointed Proteas’ captain, a time where Rishabh Pant and Suryakumar Yadav hadn’t yet arrived in the game, a young man made a handy 47 with the bat against Lanka in the tri series contest at Zimbabwe. 

His team won by the contest convincingly. Shai Hope had arrived. 

His next ODI inning, then just his second, would produce a century. 

A crafty 101 had a sense of pleasantness and compactness the team bellied by big hitters so desperately sought. 

Shai Hope was well and truly on his way. 

Within a few months’ time, he’d achieve astronomical fame in Test cricket by becoming the first batsman in no fewer than 118 years to hit a ton in both innings at Headingley. 

England were stunned. Hope, with his 147 and 118*, was their troller. 

Fans said to themselves, remember the name and the date: 29 August, 2017.   

It was the perfect English August just that it wasn’t quite so for England.   

Further heights would come in the form of a breathtaking record ODI stand of 365 runs (first wicket) with the now suspended John Campbell against Ireland in 2019. 

Hope made yet another century. 

Just a few months prior to his routing of the Irish, he’d traveled to Virat Kohli land, where he thunder struck his way to a 123 off 134 deliveries to tie a game that his Windies nearly lost. 

At the end of a nearly 44-over long vigil at the crease, even Virat Kohli joined hands in admiration. The Indian maestro had scored a century in the match himself. 

But Shai Hope became the cynosure of the eyes, the reason for Pollard-led West Indies avoiding a whitewash back then. 

Nearly, half a decade back since the action-packed tour to the sub-continent, not much has changed. 

Shai Hope is still opening the batting. He’s still, very much, the path giver to a team that often seems directionless in its approach to batting. 

And lest we forget, he’s still courting news for carrying his bat well into the death overs, going often well past the forty overs of Windies’ ODI innings. 

The centuries haven’t stopped. He hit one in the Netherlands in his country’s maiden tour to Orange Country! 

He hit a spellbinding one at Pakistan very recently, bringing with it, his 4000th ODI run   and reaching the fifties in the batting average department. 

The ability to focus for long hours at the crease, collecting runs both painstakingly and stylishly are still very much Hope’s eternal gifts and Windies’ core strength (of the few) in the ODI arena.  

There maybe pauses in his game in that he beautifully holds the pose after stroking a silky off drive but there aren’t any full stops. 

And they’ll likely never be for quitting under pressure is easy, but shying away from giving Hope to the West Indies is not what Shai knows. 

If anything, his team would want the batsman, who has it in him to become a maestro, to revive a fledgling Test career.