The heart-warming story behind Sheldon Cotterell’s salute celebration

The moment Cotterell ran in, with a skipping, bounding run of galvanised energy and a delivery stride perfectly front-on but exploding at all angles, to dismiss Glenn Maxwell with a well-directed bumper that clipped the batsman’s top-edge and went miles up in the air before Shai Hope gobbled it up, it would have made any Windies pacer of the yore proud. But for Cotterell, it was not the time to think about anything else as a smile instantly weaves across his face before he starts his parade to give the grand salute. That follows another moment of ecstasy for him as he arches back to celebrate the dismissal. 

The origin of the story though, goes back to May 2010, when Cotterell, who works as a private in the Jamaican Defence Force (JDF), had to fight in the deadly Tivoli Incursion that turned a portion of Kingston into a war zone. During the fight, Jamaican police and military combined to thwart the Shower Posse drug cartel in their quest to find drug lord Christopher Dudu Coke and it was a mission as deadly as it could get. Cotterell was just a 21-year-old then and lost a couple of his colleagues during the mission. 

Call it coincidence or divine intervention, but Cotterell had just received his first call-up to the Jamaica team in the same year before the Tivoli affair delayed his first-class debut which eventually happened against Guyana at St Elizabeth in February 2011. The happiness of getting into the cricket team was at the pinnacle for Cotterell as said in an interview to Cricket Journalist Bharat Sundaresan, who was working for Indian Express then, "I prefer balls to bullets any day. Cricket is not life and death. There is a certain intensity in both situations and you have to think on your feet, but bowling yorkers is far easier than being fired and shot at.”

When Cotterell said that, there was a truth attached to it. In June 2011, when India travelled to West Indies for a short tour after their World Cup win, Cotterell made Rahul Dravid duck and weave with his express pace in the Sabina Park nets. That came just a day after he was decked in army camouflage and beret for his duty as army personnel to guard the square during the final ODI of India's tour. 

Now, that he is donning the Windies jersey at a regular basis and living his dream of playing a World Cup, it is not easy for him to keep that happiness in the box and adapt to the lifestyle that comes by default of being an international cricketer. He might say that Cricket is a safer place and better than “being fired and shot at” but when he is bowling, the batsmen can’t say the same thing. A soldier mightn’t have been sending the original bullets anymore but the metaphorical ones are coming out pretty nicely. And his parade and salute is a celebration of that bravery and a tribute to all those memories that he had while serving JDF as a 20-year-old.