Sunil Narine Is 38, Bowls at Ninety, and Nobody Has Worked Him Out Yet
Four for 12 at Kensington Oval with his team on the brink. A title in America in July. Six hundred and fifty T20 wickets in August. He has been doing this since I was at school, and I was not a good student.
In this piece
Saturday night, Bridgetown
Trinbago Knight Riders went to Barbados as defending champions with two wins from eight, second-last on the table, and a coach who had told them in public to look in the mirror. Lose and they were out. They batted first and made 147 for 6, which at Kensington Oval is a total you defend by apologising.
Then Sunil Narine bowled 3.3 overs for 12 runs and four wickets, the Tridents were all out for 112 in 18.3 overs, and 147 was plenty. Won by 35. His 3.3 overs went for 12; the other fifteen went for 100, and that is the whole story of the season in one scorecard.
It was also, after fourteen seasons and more CPL wickets than anyone alive, his first four-wicket haul in the competition. He has taken the most wickets in the tournament's history without once taking four in a game. He has been doing it two and three at a time, at five an over, for fourteen years, like a man paying off a mortgage.
I have watched him do this for fourteen years and I still could not tell you what happens. He runs in like a man late for a bus he does not care about. The ball leaves his hand at about ninety kilometres an hour, which is slower than I bowl, and I bowl what the scorer records as medium. It does not turn much any more. Batters who have faced him a hundred times play down the wrong line anyway, on purpose, as if it were a plan. It is not a plan. It is fear with a bat in its hands.
The year he's had
He is 38. Here is his 2026, so far.
In the IPL he took 15 wickets for Kolkata at under seven an over, became the third bowler to 200 IPL wickets and the first overseas player to 200 IPL games. Among the 38 bowlers who have bowled 300 overs in that competition, his economy is the best. Not top five. The best. In a tournament designed, lit and priced to make bowlers cry.
In July he went to America and reinvented himself as a powerplay bowler, which is like a retired accountant taking up cage fighting and winning. Eighteen wickets in eleven games, fifteen of them in the first six overs, at 4.74 an over, average 11. Los Angeles won the title by one run and he took 3 for 13 in the final. Player of the match. Player of the tournament. Another trophy for a man who has to be running out of shelf.
Then he came home. First game of the CPL, 3 for 7. Twenty-one dot balls out of 24. The Patriots scored off three of his deliveries all night and I assume those three batters have been spoken to. On 27 August he became the second bowler in history to 650 T20 wickets, behind only Rashid Khan, who is twelve years younger and will be reading this. The next night he took 2 for 14 and made 55 off 33 with six sixes, his first fifty in any T20 since May 2024, because apparently the wickets were getting boring.
And tonight, 4 for 12 to defend 147, with the season on the line and the rest of the side having spent a month proving they cannot be trusted with it.
What he is not
He is not quick. He is not, at this point, a big turner of the ball. He has not played for West Indies since 2023 and he did not play for them much before that, because the system that produced him could never quite decide whether to pick him or apologise for him.
The ICC reported his action in 2014 and stopped him bowling in 2015. He rebuilt it, came back, and has since taken more wickets than most of the people who reported him have watched. I mention this not to relitigate it, because they were entitled to look, but because it is the only time in his career anyone found a way to stop him, and it required a rulebook.
Batters have had fourteen years and every camera angle known to science. They still play him like a bloke who has heard about spin.
Why this one hurts
My standing grudge, and it is written on the About page so I cannot walk it back, is shit bowlers getting wickets. Blokes who bowl nothing, at nothing, and pick up three for 20 because the batter got bored. I have watched them do it every Saturday of my adult life while I ran in as hard as I could and went for 40.
Narine is the opposite and it is worse. He bowls slowly, at a stump, and the ball does almost nothing, and the best T20 batters in the world cannot lay a bat on it. He is proof that the thing I have always believed, which is that pace and effort should count for something, is wrong. It counts for nothing. What counts is that the batter has no idea, and never has, and at 38 he has stopped bothering to hide that he knows it.
Two wins from eight. On the brink. Four for 12 in 3.3 overs, his first four-for in the competition he owns. Nobody has worked him out, and now they are out of time.
Things I loved
- Ninety kilometres an hour. I bowl faster than that and have never taken four for anything.
- Twenty-one dot balls from 24 against the Patriots, and the three that weren't.
- Fourteen CPL seasons, the most wickets in its history, and tonight was his first four-for. Two at a time, for fourteen years.
- Fifteen powerplay wickets in an American summer, at 38, as a career change.
- Rashid Khan, 650 wickets clear of everyone except one man, and that man is still bowling.
