International cricket has not been easy for Rovman Powell. His explosive century against England on Wednesday was his 60th innings for West Indies across both white-ball formats and only the sixth time he had gone past 50. With his batting averages hovering around the mid-20s and his strike rates hardly catching the eye, his role in their side was unclear. There was no great outcry when he was left out of the side for the first two T20Is against England, and he has not played an ODI for a year.But Powell has spent his life thriving in spite of adversity. He has never met his father, who encouraged his mother Joan to get an abortion then left her to her own devices when she refused; she raised him and his sister in a run-down, two-room house in Bannister District near Old Harbour in Jamaica.“Adjectives are inadequate in describing my mother,” he told the Caribbean Premier League’s ‘Life Stories’ series in 2020. “Whenever I’m down, whenever I’m faced with tough challenges, I just decide that ‘listen, I’m not doing it for myself… I’m doing it for her, I’m doing it for my sister. I’m doing it for the ones I love, just so they can live a better life than I lived when I was a child.”
