The Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) of the Indian Premier League recently announced on its official Twitter handle (@RCBTweets) that the jersey numbers (17) and (333) worn by the renowned players AB de Villers and Chris Gayle will be retired permanently. On March 26 of this year, the two jerseys will be enshrined in the IPL Hall of Fame.
RCB will play host at the Chinnaswamy Stadium for the event, which will include the two celebrities. AB De Villers and jersey number 17 go hand in together. Villiers has been a part of the organisation for the past 11 years. He has participated in 156 games throughout 11 seasons, scoring 4491 runs. For the Bangalore franchise, he hit 37 fifties and two centuries.
For RCB, De Villiers achieved a strike rate of 152, with two 200-plus stands and five 100-plus partnerships with Virat Kohli. As a result of his assault on Dale Steyn in the 2012 IPL, Villiers won the award for most powerful knock. Like when he scored a beautiful hundred in Mumbai in 2015 and another one in Bengaluru in 2016 against Gujarat Lions, he was always a finisher of the highest calibre. Villiers, however, shocked the cricket world by announcing his retirement from the sport in November of 2021.
Chris Gayle’s jersey number 333 represented his invincible on-field persona. Chris Gayle scored the first hundred in the IPL’s history, back in the league’s heady early days. The savage West Indies player was a bowler’s worst nightmare from that day on.
Gayle holds every batting record there is, from the most runs (now 10,000) to the most hundreds, the fastest hundred, and the most fours and sixes. Once he swung a Brett Lee delivery past the Lord Tennyson school outside Oval, earning him the title of “one of the most barbarous hitters of the cricket ball ever.” Even in the Indian Premier League, Gayle has a perfect record.
In 2009, he debuted with the Kolkata Knight Riders and in 2011, he made the switch to the RCB. He scored 708 runs for RCB in 2013 in 16 matches, including an undefeated 175 in one of those games. Soon after, in 2018, he was purchased by the Punjab Kings, where he spent the next four seasons. Gayle has been called a larger-than-life figure in cricket, and his gregarious nature is well-known off the field.
He also donates to charitable organisations through the Chris Gayle Foundation, which helps fund schools and hospitals in his native Jamaica. Every player and young sports fan looks up to him as an inspiration.
