IN one of the many of his imperious master classes, Brian Lara amassed 688 runs in three Tests in the West Indies’ last encounter against Sri Lanka two and a half years.
It is a personal performance that won’t satisfy the captain if Sri Lanka repeat their clean sweep of the 2001 series in the rematch in the Caribbean over the next two weeks.
Lara is looking for more support than he got then. He averaged 114, Ramnaresh Sarwan 53 from 318 runs and the next best was Carl Hooper with 27 (167 runs) as the West Indies twice lost by 10 wickets and once by 131 runs.
“What happened in Sri Lanka was that only two guys were getting runs,” Lara observed yesterday on the eve of the first of the two Tests, the inaugural Test at the Beausejours Stadium, here today. “It clearly showed that cricket is a team game.”
“We just weren’t getting partnerships,” he said. “I might have batted with seven or eight batsmen during my innings.”
What Lara is looking for are “three or four hundred partnerships to get the required total for our bowlers to put them under pressure”.
He needed only to refer to the West Indies’ last Test innings to illustrate his point.
Their record 418 for seven that carried them to victory over Australia in the final Test at the Antigua Recreation Ground last month featured successive partnerships of 91 (Lara and Ramnaresh Sarwan), 123 (Sarwan and Shivnarine Chanderpaul), 84 (Chanderpaul and Omari Banks) and, ultimately, 46 unbeaten (Banks and Vasbert Drakes).
“We’ve got to play better cricket than we did in Sri Lanka,” Lara said. “We’ve got to aim for longevity in the batting department and to be very attacking in our bowling.”
Both Lara and Sri Lankan captain Hashan Tillakaratne were guarded in their assessment of the pitch.
After heavy rain on Monday and overnight Tuesday that precluded net practice, the weather cleared enough yesterday for both teams to have sessions in the nets.
But more heavy showers returned in the late afternoon to influence both selection panels to delay the choice of their starting teams.
“I wish I could announce our final eleven but I can’t do that until the morning as the wicket is a little damp,” Sri Lankan captain Hashan Tillakaratne told the media conference. “All I can say is that it looks a little harder than we expected.”
Lara saw the weather leading up to the match as “a major factor”.
“I think there’ll be a little moisture in it and there might be moisture throughout, depending on how the weather pans out,” he said. “As far as I can see, it’s going to be overcast for much of the weekend so there’s going to be something in it for the bowlers, especially the swing bowlers, but it also should be a decent batting pitch if you get in.”
Reading between the lines, it seems as if Sri Lanka would include three fast bowlers and the West Indies plump for all four of theirs, meaning a debut for the impressive 18-year-old Jamaican Jerome Taylor and another chance four years after his solitary Test for Corey Collymore.
It would be unsympathetic selection to omit Banks, the ice-cool, 20-year-old Anguillan, after his heroics in the victory over Australia but it would be a straight case of horses for courses - and there is no doubt over his future in West Indies cricket.
As they were in the series in Sri Lanka, when he was eliminated by a back injury, the West Indies are again weakened by the absence of Chanderpaul, the reliable, but injury-prone left-hander.
His 68 Tests and average of 44.2 make him second only to Lara in potential value but he has not yet recovered from a broken finger, sustained in the fielding in the ARG triumph over Australia.
It opens the way for a return to the middle order of the talented, but infuriatingly wasteful, Marlon Samuels.
According to Lara, there is a personal incentive for Samuels and everyone else that should drive a strong overall performance.
“It’s significent that we don’t have a lot of cricket (after this) before we go to Zimbabwe and South Africa later in the year so a lot of guys will be looking to secure spots for these tours,” he said. “I’m sure that means everyone’s anxious to get out there in the middle.”
Lara also suggested the need for a different approach to Sri Lanka’s main threats, left-arm swinger Chaminda Vaas and off-spinner Muttiah Muralitheran.
The pair undermined them in Sri Lanka and in their World Cup defeat in Cape Town in February and were approached with caution in the preceding one-day international series that Sri Lanka won 2-1.
“We maybe put them too much on a pedestal in the one-day series,” Lara conceded. “We shut up shop against Vaas early on and Murali didn’t go for many runs.”
“Maybe we’ve got to play them on merit,” he said. “We’ve got to take advantage of it if they’re having a bad day and make sure they don’t get on top of us psychologically.”
Sri Lanka have brought the identical batting order than pummelled the West Indies bowling for totals of 590 for nine declared in the first Test and 627 for nine declared in the third at home in 2001.
They remain as dangerous as any in the world but they are notoriously less so away from their own environment and especially on a pitch that should aid seam bowling.
Teams (expected):
West Indies: Brian Lara (captain), Chris Gayle, Daren Ganga, Wavell Hinds, Ramnaresh Sarwan, Ridley Jacobs, Vasbert Drakes (or Omari Banks), Merv Dillon, Corey Collymore and Jerome Taylor.