Sunil Narine’s career: Courage, resilience and an indomitable will

Sunil Nar­ine’s sto­ry is one that many young peo­ple can learn from and be in­spired by—not just crick­eters, but all sports­men and women. It can even in­spire those with no in­ter­est in sport who want to learn what it takes to suc­ceed and ful­fil their po­ten­tial. Nar­ine stared de­feat and de­spair square in the eye and beat the odds, over­com­ing those who seemed in­tent on keep­ing him small and mediocre.

​The Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL) T20 tour­na­ment is in full swing. Last week, the Queen’s Park Oval was packed most evenings as the Trin­ba­go Knight Rid­ers (TKR) strug­gled in de­fence of their CPL ti­tle. T20’s en­er­gy and mar­ket­ing have cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion of fans around the world. T20 crick­et is not a run­away horse or train; it is a glob­al sport­ing jug­ger­naut and a brand that I pre­dict will be­come a main­stay on the Olympic pro­gramme, start­ing with LA2028.

​Case in point: In a few weeks, the Asian Games 2026 T20 event will bowl off. The names of the par­tic­i­pat­ing coun­tries bear lit­tle re­sem­blance to the tra­di­tion­al crick­et-play­ing na­tions of yes­ter­year. The Asian Crick­et Coun­cil (ACC) has an­nounced the sched­ule for the men’s and women’s com­pe­ti­tions, with all match­es played in the T20 for­mat at Palo­ma Mizuho Sta­di­um in Nagoya, Japan. The tour­na­ment runs from Sep­tem­ber 17 to Oc­to­ber 3, with the women’s event be­gin­ning first be­fore the men’s com­pe­ti­tion gets un­der­way on Sep­tem­ber 24. In­dia are the de­fend­ing cham­pi­ons in both events af­ter win­ning gold at the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou.

​Back to the CPL: Re­gard­less of what hap­pens with TKR this year, the lega­cy and leg­end of Sunil Nar­ine re­main undi­min­ished. Watch­ing him play at the Queen’s Park Oval and lis­ten­ing to an on­line in­ter­view, the thought struck me that, had things been dif­fer­ent, Nar­ine could eas­i­ly have fall­en off the wag­on and dis­ap­peared. That he didn’t, and in­stead kept fight­ing back against every dis­ap­point­ment and myr­i­ad set­backs over the years to build a glob­al rep­u­ta­tion as a T20 leg­end, is a cred­it to his re­silience, de­ter­mi­na­tion, ded­i­ca­tion, and for­ti­tude. It is al­so a cred­it to his sup­port sys­tem: his fam­i­ly, close friends, and nu­mer­ous oth­ers.

​Ul­ti­mate­ly, he still had to choose not to give up or sur­ren­der. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, if one had to be truth­ful, it al­so has to be said that crick­et lead­ers didn’t make things easy for him. This brings in­to fo­cus Nar­ine’s re­fusal to not be­come bit­ter and, no mat­ter what, he kept learn­ing and be­com­ing bet­ter.

​There are many nuggets of wis­dom in that in­ter­view. It was a pod­cast called The Su­per Over, and the episode was ti­tled “The Rein­ven­tion of Sunil Nar­ine.” I strong­ly rec­om­mend that any­one watch it. What sur­prised me is that, for all these years, he has rarely giv­en in­ter­views, mak­ing it a pleas­ant sur­prise when a good friend sent me the link.

​One in­sight he re­vealed was that he start­ed play­ing darts and ex­per­i­ment­ed with the dart an­gle for his hand and came up with a new de­liv­ery that has proven very im­pact­ful. This shows the im­por­tance of push­ing the en­ve­lope and step­ping out­side your com­fort zone. Lis­ten­ing to him, it is clear that he re­mains deeply com­mit­ted to his craft and his pur­suit of ex­cel­lence.