From a PRINCE to a KING
By Garth Wattley
Trinidad Express
January 1, 2004
The first time is always the best. That is what conventional wisdom says. But Brian Lara's career has been anything but conventional. So it should surprise few that at age 34, with fully 90 Test matches behind him at the start of the in the year he became captain of the West Indies for the second time, that Lara proceeded to play, arguably, the best cricket of his international career.
It is hard though to argue with the sheer weight of Lara's runs and the manner and circumstances in which he scored them.
The stark numbers alone show 2003 to be the most bountiful year of all for the Prince of Port of Spain.
Up to the Second Test against South Africa in Durban, Lara had scored more runs than any other player in world cricket-1,261-at an average of 78.81 in nine matches. That number also included a world-leading five centuries. Not even in 2001 when he plundered Sri Lanka's bowling alone for 688 runs in just three Tests; or 1999 when he conquered Australia in the Caribbean; or 1995 when he notched four centuries in 12 Tests and amassed 1,222 runs, has Lara scored so heavily. As a lagniappe, the man who lost his world record for the highest score in a Test innings to Australian Matthew Hayden, set another new mark, this time for the most runs in a single over in Test cricket-28.
This year also saw Lara pass Sir Garfield Sobers and Sir Viv Richards to become West Indies' all-time leading scorer.
In the field, the West Indies captain standing mostly in the slips, held 17 catches,
which among outfielders, was bettered only
by England's Marcus Trescothick (20 in 13 games) and Hayden (19 in 11). In the process, he also became West Indies' leading catcher in Tests (133).
Those are numbers to delight the statisticians. Indeed, so impressed were Price Waterhouse that they made Lara their number one in the latest rankings. Lara's solid
numbers hardly thin out when his one-day
figures are added: 888 runs, three 100s, average 46.73.
Lara the batting craftsman though, was as just as refreshing as Lara the maker of runs. There was really nothing about the way he did his stuff in 2003 that Lara watchers had not seen before. No single innings quite approached the technical brilliance of the 277 of Sydney 1992-93. What they saw instead was the basics working beautifully with a touch of genius.
Over and over, regardless of the opponents, Lara got his feet into the right positions whether to play defensively or strike the ball to the boundary. The pattern was set in the home series against Australia where his opposite number Steve Waugh's two gully theory was rendered ineffective.
The Aussies also tried it short and to the body. But again, Lara was up for the challenge.
No one with all their faculties intact will forget Lara's maiden Test ton on home soil at the Queen's Park Oval, largely for the fact that in getting it in the second innings of a promising but ultimately failed run chase, he survived a hostile and thoroughly searching spell of fast bowling from Brett Lee on what was supposedly a docile strip. Lara did so because of his excellent technique and courage.
His 202 against the South Africans in the First Test of the away series at Johannesburg, was similarly outstanding for those reasons. The 28 he smashed off Robin Peterson's left-arm spin in the last session was possible only because Lara had had the patience and fortitude to battle through the two tight and even bruising sessions that preceded it.
In a different way, his duels in the Caribbean with the Sri Lankan Muttiah Muralitharan and his marvellous off-spinners, were equally impressive. Even in scoring 209 in St Lucia in the First Test, Lara was never completely Murali's master but his level of concentration and discipline was such that success was ultimately his. So it had been all year.
Here was a man thoroughly enjoying his cricket. Lara's fielding was energetic and his rapport with the young team he had accepted the challenge of moulding, was encouraging.
There seemed to be less distance emotionally between the man and his men than in the past. And if things were not always smooth, especially when the champion Australians were convincingly winning the first three matches of the four-Test series, there was largely an intent to be positive. Players and captain grew enough together so that that remarkable 418-run victory chase in Antigua was achieved, with a contribution of no more than... from the skipper.
If his batting was outstanding, Lara's captaincy continued to be unpredictable. He still appears to have a tendency to be too singular and impulsive in his thinking. But his instinctive nature helped him bring to the fore a major fast-bowling find in Fidel Edwards.
Perhaps, that was truly Lara's masterstroke in '03.
The 21-year-old Edwards' dramatic five-wicket entry into Test cricket is already part of Caribbean cricket folklore, the new find being as celebrated as his captain's decision to pick him.
Lara's stocks rose around the region with that calculated gamble that paid off. But more straightforward gestures also helped to lift his status among Caribbean people.
His off-season trips to Barbados for some club cricket and ventures to Bermuda and the Cayman Islands for a little playing and coaching, were further indications of a man for whom the game had ceased being merely a necessary evil, a cause for ruination.
This was Renaissance Lara reaching out and touching sincerely an eager but somewhat disaffected public, made wary by previous acts of indifference.
Most truly, the Prince has fully earned the right to be king.