Bharat Sundaresan—the Indian journalist, who in 2017, wrote a story about the struggles of former West Indies fast bowler Patrick Patterson—has started a GoFundMe page to raise funds for the beleaguered Jamaican.

Sundaresan intends to raise US$20,000 to help the 59-year-old Patterson, who took 93 wickets in 28 Tests between 1986 and 1993.

“Mr Patterson is currently struggling to even purchase groceries and to make sure he gets two meals a day. This is a plea not only to the cricketing community but to everyone who he entertained with his breath-taking displays of raw pace and that inimitable bowling action which has been attempted in every gully and backyard around the world,” the journalist said on the fundraiser page.

So far, the fund has raised just over US$13,000.

Writing for the Indian Express in 2017, Sundaresan travelled to Jamaica on several occasions in search of Patterson. He eventually found the tear-away fast bowler, whom he discovered suffers from memory lapses that have caused him to remember little from his heydays.

“While Patterson is, at times, lucid, his mind seems to be in a state of flux, swinging between reality and imagination, between what happened and what he presumes had happened,” Sundaresan wrote.

“One moment, Patterson says he doesn’t know women played cricket at the highest level, the next moment he asks why the Indian Prime Minister has visited Israel after so many years. He insists that he wants to take me on a drive to show me Kingston the next time we meet, but then he reveals that he has a car that hasn’t been used for 10 years and is rotting like everything else inside his home, including its sole occupant.”

In addition to his 93 Test wickets, Patterson also took 90 ODI wickets for the West Indies and was among the most feared of the West Indies attack.

During the tour of India in the late 1980s, Patterson destroyed the home side’s batting line up taking his Test-best figures of 5 for 24 in his first innings of the first Test at New Delhi as India crumbled to 75 all out. The Jamaican would go on to take 17 wickets during the series.

Patterson was dropped during the 1993 tour of South Africa following building tensions between the bowler and Cricket West Indies administrators. During the tour of Australia that year, he walked off the field in Brisbane without telling Captain Richie Richardson.

He disappeared from public view shortly thereafter and was hardly seen again for more than two decades.