Chris Gayle relishes the opportunity of opening with Brendon McCullum again

Chris Gayle having just landed in Bangladesh admitted that he’s already feeling the pressure of expectations as he is set to partner alongside Brendon McCullum at the top of the order for Rangpur Riders in the Bangladesh Premier League. The duo is regarded as two of world’s best T20 openers and they will be coming together for the first time since their collaboration for the IPL franchise Kolkata Knight Riders in the 2009 edition.

While Gayle alone boasts of 10,571 runs including 18 hundreds in the format, his partner McCullum too is not far behind with his volume of runs. McCullum, who has scored 8245 runs from almost a similar number of games, has seven hundreds and 43 fifties. The swashbuckling West Indian was full of praise for his batting partner, terming it a ‘privilege’ to be opening the batting with him one more time.

“Everyone in Bangladesh wants to be entertained by two great entertainers in myself and McCullum,” Gayle mentioned. “This is why the pressure is going to be on us. But we expect these things. The crowd is going to be very noisy. It is going to be fantastic if we can get off to a start, hitting a lot of boundaries and get the crowd excited. Maybe the other guys can build up from it and see what total we can set or get,” he was quoted by cricbuzz.

“We know how destructive BM is. It is a privilege to open the batting with him again. We opened together way back in the IPL. Now we are joining forces together again. It is new for both of us to come in and go for a blast but we have experience,” Gayle noted.

While the West Indian admitted that there would be the expectations of the crowd to be entertained by the duo, he rubbished talks of the team being dependent entirely on them.

“There’s a lot of experience within the team led by [Mashrafe] Mortaza. The bowling attack has a lot of experience as well. We have Mr. [Ravi] Bopara as well. It is not a situation where we can look to depend on one particular person. There are a lot of match winners in the team. It is not like we are going to depend on Gayle and McCullum to get the job done,” he stated.