Kieron Pollard: maverick or mercenary?

Kieron Pollard has not yet made his Test debut for West Indies. Yet he is a millionaire today having played just one first-class game in the past two years and having survived almost exclusively on Twenty20 cricket. Depending on your viewpoint, writes Jonathan Liew in the Daily Telegraph, Pollard is the most exciting cricketer in the world today or a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern game.

“Test cricket is always going to be the ultimate. My ambition is to play in all three formats. Next year, I’m going to play more first-class cricket. I decided not to go to the T20 tournament in South Africa because I wanted to play first-class cricket in the Caribbean. The Sri Lankan league is off now, but I pulled out of that as well.”

You sense that nothing Pollard says will sway his most ardent critics. But for a man accused of destroying Test cricket, he holds a suspiciously strong desire to play it. For someone castigated as a pariah, a philistine, a soldier of fortune, he is in reality something far simpler: just a cricketer. Just a family man, striving to earn a living.