When a successor to the recently resigned Nicholas Pooran as the West Indies white ball cricket captain is
eventually appointed, Rovman Powell’s name will certainly
be very high among those in contention for the position.
As recently indicated by Sruthi Ravindranath a sub-editor
at ESPNcricinfo. Rovman Powell’s heroic story is that of a young boy who
saw in the game a way to give his family a better life and
pinned all his hopes on it.
Rovman Powell might have excelled at track and field. He
could have done well at studies. Or he might have joined
the military – after all, he is certain he wants to be a soldier
in his next life. But thanks to what he calls his “natural
power-hitting talent” and a crucial push from his PE teacher
in school, he took up cricket and has made a more than
handy fist of it.
Powell had a natural inclination towards sport since he was a
child, when he spent nights watching and talking about West
Indies cricket with his grandfather and great-grandfather,
who played a big role in him gravitating towards cricket.
Brian Lara was the face of West Indies cricket back then.
“He was everything people talked about,” Powell says. “I
watched a lot of Brian Lara.”
When in primary school, he identified sport and education
as the two things he might use to take his family out of
poverty. He had had enough of watching his mother work
tirelessly to put food on the table for his younger sister and
him. Their two-room house in the Bannister area of Old
Harbour, about 25km south-west of Kingston in Jamaica,
had a metal roof that required repairs all the time to keep
the rain out. (In a CPL documentary released earlier this
year, Powell spoke about how he would keep watch on
rainy nights, while his mother and sister slept, to make
sure the water didn’t reach them.) He remembers his
mother tried to build a better house but had to abandon
the project for lack of money.
Powell promised her he would lift the family out of their
hardship. “When I started playing professional cricket, I
made that my job,” he says. “First thing I did was get her a
nice house.” A few years on, he also bought her a car – a
Hyundai Tucson. “She can drive around, go to the grocery
store peacefully and come back,” he says. Now well clear
of the poverty that dogged his youth, he recently posted a
picture of himself with his new Mercedes on Instagram:
Powell grew up taking care of his sister when his mother was out
working. Deciding to try to make a go of it at cricket was not easy. The
sport was expensive and his family could ill afford the cost. “When she
[my mother] bought me a bat or shoes, I had to take very good care of
it and ensure it lasts for the longest possible time.”
He told himself if it did not work out with the game, he would go back
to his education. He had used a sports scholarship to study geography
and social studies at the University of West Indies. His childhood was
not the typical one you might think of when you paint a picture of
an upbringing in Jamaica, notorious for its crime and violence. Powell’s
West Indies team-mate Oshane Thomas has spoken about his brother
being killed in a shooting, and being the victim of a hold-up himself.
No such horrors for Powell, who grew up in one of the more peaceful
neighbourhoods on the island, one where most people knew each
other. He says the community pushed him to achieve his dreams, and
also to take his schooling seriously.
Another Russell, much better known, was also an influence. Powell
knew Andre Russell from the time they played schools cricket – Powell
for Old Harbour High School and Russell for
Clarendon College. Later they both played
for Old Harbour CC. Powell realised that
Russell’s story was like his own. Russell
passed on tips in the gym and gave
Powell a few important lessons on
improving his power-hitting
game.
January 26, 2022 was a turning point for
Powell. That day, England’s bowlers watched
him clatter the ball around the ground as
he brought up his T20 best of 107. It was a
defining innings; he did not regularly make the
West Indies XI prior to it, but since then has
been part of all 19 matches they have played.
Powell’s big break came when he was 23. In
April 2016, he was snapped up by Tallawahs
for US$40,000 after being identified as an
emerging talent on the back of his big hitting
in the middle order for Combined Campuses
in the regional Super 50 tournament, where he
averaged 47 in his five innings.
In the 2016 CPL, when he played all 13 games
for the side, who won the title, Powell’s power hitting
was on display for a larger audience.
Another good Super50 season followed (356
runs in ten games, averaging 44), where his
ruthlessness with the bat was on display, this
time for Jamaica, particularly in the semi-final
and final, in which two games he hauled in 160
runs and seven wickets.
Around this time he also caught the eye of IPL
scouts, landing a Rs 30 lakh ($42,000) deal with
Kolkata Knight Riders and becoming one of
only two uncapped overseas players picked up
at that year’s auction.
About a month after that, he made his
international debut, against Pakistan in the UAE.
He made the XI in T20Is against Afghanistan
and India in June and July that year, though he
didn’t get to bat in three of four games. His
contributions in the CPL season that followed
weren’t significant. While he took on the fast
bowlers with a certain amount of confidence,
he evidently struggled against spin, especially
wristspin, and teams seemed to know how to
set him up.
From 2018 to 2021, 15 of the 21 T20Is
Powell played were against teams from the
subcontinent, which further exposed his
deficiencies against spin. During the ODI
series in 2018 in India, his struggles against
spin were laid bare: he managed just 65 runs
in five ODIs and one T20I.
The inconsistency and technical struggles
meant Powell soon found himself on the
fringes of the West Indies team. There
was the odd good innings but no extended
solid patch of form. In the first 11 months
of 2021, he played just one T20I, and he
did not find a place in the T20 World Cup
squad that year.
During his time away from the national
team, he found ways to improve his game,
and looked to play in Asia more. He signed
up for the PSL in 2021, and for the Abu
Dhabi T10, where he finished fifth on the
run-scorers’ chart. He then headed to the
Lanka Premier League, where he turned
out for Kandy Warriors and scored a
Rovman Powell-esque 19-ball 61 in a match
against eventual champions Jaffna Kings.
Around the same time, Kieron Pollard, the
West Indies captain then, was ruled out of
the Pakistan tour due to injury, and Powell
was recalled into the T20I squad – though
he didn’t exactly impress again, with 33 runs
from three innings. Cue the hundred against
England, where Powell made the XI after
having sat out of the first two T20Is.
His stocks high going into the IPL 2022
auction, Powell landed a Rs 2.8 crore
($364,000) deal with Delhi Capitals. He did
decently well in the tournament, with 250
runs in 12 innings at a strike rate of 150.
At that point, Bishop saw clear progress in
Powell’s ability to handle spin, and in how
comfortable he was bringing out the sweep
against the spinners, some of them the
biggest names around.
Powell’s troubles against slow bowling are
not quite behind him, and his numbers
against spin don’t look drastically different
than from five years ago, but he does see an
improvement, he says. It’s work in progress
and it has involved not just training in the
nets but a lot of talking about his game,
thinking it through, and opening himself to
learning. Among the conversations he has
had are some with his cricket heroes: Brian
Lara asked him to trust his technique; Ricky
Ponting, who is his coach at Capitals, said
all Powell had to do was to use his crease
better.
One of the very first things Bishop says about
Powell is that he is a “no-nonsense guy”, not one
to skirt tough conversations off the field, willing to
call out senior players if he thinks they’re not pulling
their weight. Powell smiles as he acknowledges the
description.
For Bishop, it’s Powell’s on-field persona that
makes him a good leader – the way he manages
his players, or how he speaks about himself or his
team at the toss or in post-match presentations.
“Watching him on the field, the hand signals, they’re
not ostentatious,” he says. “You can see the field
and you can see who the leader is, and that’s what
leadership is partly about too. He seems to put
himself in the field where there’s high-traffic areas,
where there’s going to be more activity.”
Powell, who was named vice-captain of West Indies
in June this year, is clear about what the priorities
should be. He wanted to work with captain Nicholas
Pooran to bring out the best of the young crop of
West Indies cricketers.
Bishop believes Powell with his strength of vision
can be instrumental in inspiring the next generation
of West Indies cricket talent. “I want people to
know we have people out there with morals,
because a lot of people look at West Indians and
West Indies cricketers and stereotype them,” he
says. “I think Rovman is slowly breaking that mould
and I’m immensely proud that we in the region have
a young man like that.”
A young man from Old Harbour who dared to
dream that he would take his family out of poverty,
and now dreams about playing a part in West Indies
earning back some of the love and respect they let
go over the years.