Brian Lara and the Nature of Talent

The greatest streak in the history of batting began right here, 30 years ago

Over the next six weeks, or for as long as Lara’s 1994 streak lasted, we’ll have a series of pieces and hopefully our debut podcast, about the man and his meaning. I started writing the introductory post and then realised that I’d already written it, and done it probably about as well as I was going to. This longer essay originally appeared in my book Bat, Ball & Field, published a couple of years ago by William Collins. Rather than re-hash it, I thought I’d put it up here as our intro, to be followed by all-new stuff over the next few weeks. Have at it…

                                             The Streak: 16 April – 6 June 1994
                                            375, 147, 106, 120, 136*, 26, 140, 501*

Talent is a strange thing. Most people seemed to think of it as manifesting in a kind of effortlessness or aesthetic beauty, highest in players who didn’t appear to have to try as hard as the others. David Gower was a classic example. He batted as though he was floating a couple of inches above the turf, every shot a dreamy waft of the bat that made facing Malcolm Marshall or Dennis Lillee look like an enjoyable afternoon diversion before cocktail hour. He finished his Test career with 8,231 runs at an average of 44.25. His England team-mate and sparring partner Graham Gooch had similar figures, 8,900 runs at 42.58, but the way he made them was very different. Gooch was round-shouldered and ursine with a droopy moustache that seemed to capture his mood, and he scored his runs with brooding power. His training regime was legendary and when he was England captain, he had lost patience with what he saw as Gower’s casual approach and dropped him for a tour of India in 1993, which in turn prompted Gower to retire. It caused an almighty row at the MCC, who gave a vote of no confidence in the selectors, and everyone seemed to fall on one side or the other, either Gooch’s pragmatic drive to improve the team by hard work or Gower’s more romantic dilettante-ism that met this urge for beauty above all else.

Gooch carried on until he was 44 and across all forms of cricket scored more runs than anyone who had ever played the game. Gower floated effortlessly from the Test arena to the commentary box, where he made presenting live cricket on TV look very easy. It seemed like an open and shut case: Gooch had squeezed every run possible from his inbuilt supply of talent, while Gower had been far more casual with his. Except Gower had often said that although it didn’t look like he was trying, he was, and very hard: ‘I was never destined to be on the ball 100 per cent of the time. I don't have the same ability that Graham Gooch has, to produce something very close to his best every time he plays. There were Test matches where I suddenly felt, at the end of it, ‘Well, I wish I'd really been at that one’.’

The stats said that talents of Gower and Gooch were broadly of the same level. The difference was more in how we perceived the nature of that talent: we gave more weight to making things look easy than we did to having the power to concentrate and focus.

The nature of cricket was that everyone who played would eventually hit the ceiling of their talent, whether they climbed there like a Sherpa on Everest or drifted angelically upwards like Gower. Only a very, very few, an infinitesimally small percentage, found that for them there was no ceiling, that when they were at their peak, they were simply better than everyone else who was playing. Don Bradman was one, of course, just as WG had been, and Shane Warne, but it was a tiny, transcendent few. One of them was the Trinidadian left-hander Brian Lara, who was not set apart by his figures in quite the same way as Bradman or Grace, but who had nonetheless produced passages of such sustained virtuosity it was impossible to think that anyone had ever batted better, or could do.

The most remarkable of those passages began in Antigua on 16 April 1994, at the St John’s Recreation Ground. The Rec was a wonderfully ramshackle place with piecemeal stands all around the field, packed with people squatting on rows of wooden benches. There was one double-decker that always looked on the verge of collapse, especially when it was crammed with fans dancing around to the music that blared from a sound system operated by a guy called Chickie. It was best known as the home ground of Viv Richards, who had made what was then the fastest Test century of all-time, in 56 deliveries, out on the Rec against England in 1986.

Now it was Lara’s turn. He was 24 years old and had played in fifteen Test matches to date. The great era of West Indies dominance was flickering to its end, but not quite yet. The game in Antigua was the last of the series. West Indies had won the first three matches quite easily before England, as was their wont, pulled off a quixotic dead rubber victory at Bridgetown, where Alec Stewart scored a hundred in each innings. Thus they were perky enough in Antigua, and even more so when they had West Indies at 12-2 on the first morning, but then they only took one more wicket all day. When Lara had scored about sixty, Mike Atherton, England’s captain, said to Phil Tufnell, ‘He could break the record here.’ It was a prescient comment because “the record” he meant belonged to Garfield Sobers for the highest Test score of all-time, 365 against Pakistan in 1958. It was a monolithic feat, unchallenged in the intervening 36 years, and Lara still had more than 300 runs to go to beat it, but such was the certainty with which he played, the chanceless nature of every stroke and the speed at which he could score, anything seemed possible.

Lara batted all though the second day too, by which point the game had become entirely about whether or not he could surpass Sobers. As play began on day three, he required another 46 runs. The length of his innings had allowed the world to mobilise. There were film crews around the ground and Sobers had been secretly flown in from Barbados to congratulate Lara if he succeeded.

The England players were merely desperate for it to be over. ‘His bat seemed about three feet wide,’ said Angus Fraser, who toiled through 42 overs in the heat and dust. The only uncertainty was whether Lara would make a mistake as nerves took hold and the enormity of the achievement dawned on him, but he kept them in check, and described a kind of premonitory feeling as Chris Lewis bowled him a short ball that he waited for and then swivel-pulled away for the record-breaking boundary.

St John’s went crazy. Chickie’s disco reached incredible volume and the crowd ran onto the pitch. Garry Sobers manoeuvred his way through them to embrace the new king. The government of Trinidad gave Lara a house on a prime plot of land above Port of Spain. He had been anointed, and nothing could stop him now. He would never be forgotten.

The 375 in Antigua was Brian Lara’s 25th Test innings and amazingly, it wasn’t even his best so far. By any objective measure the 277 he’d made against Australia in Sydney in his fifth Test match was a better knock, and one that had turned a series in West Indies’ favour. That he was already a player of rare quality was obvious, but it was as if Antigua had opened a wellspring somewhere deep inside, and everything that he had promised would now flow out. The day after he broke the record he flew to England where he’d signed a contract worth £40,000 to play the county season with Warwickshire, whose committee members were already on their knees thanking the gods of cricket. At the first County Championship game of the season on 28 April, instead of the usual few hundred hardy locals scattered around Edgbaston, the sporting media had alighted for a glimpse of the new world record holder. They had to wait a day as Glamorgan batted first, but Lara simply picked up where he’d left off, stroking 147 from 160 deliveries, a knock that was somehow overshadowed by Roger Twose, a county journeyman who scored 277 (perhaps in unconscious tribute to Lara’s innings in Sydney), an event made even more surprising given that it was more runs than Twose had scored in the whole of the previous season.

A week later, Warwickshire went to Leicester, where Lara made 106 and 120 not out, the latter squeezing a draw from an innings where no other batsman scored more than twenty, and then, a couple of weeks after that, he made 136 against Somerset, passing a hundred from just 72 deliveries. He now had five hundreds in five innings, and only Bradman, CB Fry and the great South African all-rounder Mike Procter had ever scored six in six. He didn’t quite make it, getting to 26 against Middlesex at Lord’s before being caught behind, but made up for it with 140 in Warwickshire’s second innings.

Brian Lara had now scored 1,050 runs in his last seven visits to the crease. It had taken him a little over six weeks. If what happened next hadn’t happened at all, if it had been some kind of fever-dream or concocted, novelistic ending, then he had still produced one of the greatest sustained streaks in the history of batting.

Instead, what happened was this: Warwickshire played Durham at Edgbaston in a County Championship game that began on 2 June. Durham won the toss and went in on a pitch it’s fair to say was playing nicely. John Morris made a double hundred that would go down as one of the more quickly forgotten of its type and Durham declared after 158.5 overs with their score on 556-8. Warwickshire went in and almost immediately lost Dominic Ostler, which brought Lara to the crease. When he’d got to 11, Anderson Cummins bowled him around his legs from a no-ball. On 18, he edged one behind and Chris Scott dropped it. ‘He’ll probably get a hundred now,’ Scott muttered. In fact, Lara felt he was batting so badly that at the end of the session he kept his kit on and went straight to the nets.

As Chris Scott had thought, Brian Lara did get a hundred. Then another, and then another. He wasn’t batting badly now. Everything he hit flew by the fielders to the boundary. He went past the 375 he’d made in Antigua and then on beyond 400. The match was drawing to a close without any chance of a result. There was only one thing on anyone’s mind as Lara flayed the Durham bowling across Birmingham, a feat that came gradually into focus as the overs remaining ticked away: the highest score in all of first-class cricket, Hanif Mohammed’s 499, made at Karachi in 1959, the year after Sobers had set the Test record. Shortly after tea, Lara claimed the highest score ever made in England, surpassing Archie MacLaren’s 424, and, as word spread across Birmingham that something extraordinary was happening, he advanced to 497. He was facing John Morris, who was bowling because all of Durham’s regular bowlers had had enough of bowling at Brian Lara. Lara blocked the first four balls of Morris’ stanza, and his partner, Keith Piper, had to run down the wicket to tell him that this was the final over of the match. Lara, still unfamiliar with the playing conditions, hadn’t known. He thrashed the next delivery through the covers and walked off the ground 501 not out, now the holder of the highest scores in both Test and first-class cricket. It was an almost unimaginable feat that had taken him less than two months to achieve.

How had Brian Lara done it? And how would he go on, throughout his career, to build giant scores again and again? In 2003, Matthew Hayden went past Lara’s 375 with a score of 380 against Zimbabwe at Perth. It was a prodigious achievement, but one that would always be asterisked by the comparatively low quality of Zimbabwe’s bowling. It seemed as though Lara’s reign was over but, extraordinarily, a year after Hayden’s knock, he took the record back with an innings of 400 not out, again at St John’s and again against England.

I had a friend who’d played in that game, the England fast bowler Simon Jones, who would go on to be a part of the famous attack that won the Ashes in 2005. Lara paid Simon a tremendous back-handed compliment after he’d got the 400 when he came up to him and said: ‘I’m glad that Vaughan didn’t give you the third new ball.’

Simon said that Lara had been impossible to bowl to. You could send down three identical deliveries, and he would hit each to a different part of the ground. Every time Vaughan moved a fielder, Lara put the ball exactly where that fielder had just been, as if he was proving a point. England were convinced that he’d been out caught behind from the fourth ball that he faced, but after that, his batting had been chanceless and remorseless, hour upon hour, day upon day.

This time, though, there was no pitch invasion and no Garry Sobers. In Australia, perhaps because he’d beaten Hayden’s record or maybe because he had regularly destroyed their bowlers, they were sniffy. They said that Lara had put personal achievement above a result on a wicket prepared specifically for him to bat for a long time.

The truth was that much had changed for Lara since he rode that endless blue curve through the summer of 1994. West Indies had declined dramatically. This time when England had played them at Antigua it was the visitors who had already won the series. Lara had been captain several times and lost the captaincy several times, and his fate and the West Indies’ were intertwined. They could almost only ever win when Lara succeeded, and that burden became bound up with lots of other things: his ego, his fame, his wealth, his battles with the Caribbean administrators, his separateness as a cricketer, the essential loneliness of his position.

Graham Thorpe, who played in both the 375 and the 400 matches, felt that Lara had become less certain as the scar tissue accrued. In 1994 he’d been almost infallible, but in 2004, in the three games before Antigua, the England bowlers had roughed him up and for the first time that anyone could remember, he’d been rattled at the crease and had dropped himself down the batting order. It showed what the game could do, even to the very greatest of players.

Batting for the West Indies was chimeric in several ways. For a start the team existed as an idea rather than a nation. The islands were autonomous countries with their own governments, and in every other sport competed on those terms. The ‘West Indies’ was a cricket team and a university and that was it. At big tournaments when the national anthems were played before games West Indies didn’t have one, so they used a song written by a famous calypso musician, David Rudder, called ‘Rally Round The West Indies’. While the whole was greater than the sum of the parts they were a marvel, a signal of hope and power to the diaspora, a model of co-operation and brotherhood that shone a light on the region. For two decades they were the greatest cricket team in the world, perhaps the greatest cricket team that there had ever been. Players that would have walked into every other international side barely got a game. Under Clive Lloyd and then Viv Richards, they had a powerful and macho internal culture too, a code that kept all of the stuff about the West Indies not really existing suppressed, but when Brian Lara became captain for the first time in 1998, that natural cycle was coming to an end, and he was a very different character than Lloyd or Richards.

The captaincy was taken from Jamaica’s heroic, indefatigable opening bowler Courtney Walsh and given to Lara, a move that felt like the end of Boxer in Animal Farm. Jamaican fans were enraged, Trinidadians delighted. In short order, Lara led a players strike over pay and conditions that alienated the West Indies board, lost his first series, away in South Africa, five-nil, and had his captaincy put ‘on probation’ for the first two games of his first home series against Australia, who, in Trinidad, nonetheless won the opener by 312 runs, West Indies bowled out for 51 in their second innings.

The second game was in Jamaica. On the eve of the match, Lara went to a well known nightclub in Kingston called Asylum and missed the bus to training the next morning. Nehemiah Perry, an off-spinner who had known Lara since they played junior cricket together, and who had been selected for the Jamaica Test, understood him as well as anyone.

‘We were good mates. I knew that he liked to go out, but I couldn't go out, party and get up to play a game. I had to work too hard to get to where I was. He was so naturally good that he could go out and do all these things, then come out and make a double hundred. I never knew how he did that. Asylum was always packed. Good fun, music, you have a drink and a dance, then at three or four o'clock you roll out, go to bed, then get up by seven to go to cricket – well I couldn't manage that. But anywhere the party was, Brian was there – he was that kind of fun person. Later on I learned that what he did was, as soon as a team meeting finished, he would go to his room and sleep. So he would go to bed at maybe seven o'clock, then get up at 12 or 1am, and go down the road to some party for a drink and so on. That was his routine, and it worked wonders for him.’

When Lara went to toss up with the Australian captain Steve Waugh, he flipped the coin and murmured, ‘this is the last time I have to do this shit…’

Waugh, who was in his first Test as captain, cautioned himself against taking it seriously: ‘He was a pretty cagey bloke, Brian. You were never sure what you were going to get, whether he was mucking around with your head a bit.’

Australia batted, Waugh got a hundred and then the Australian bowlers reduced West Indies to 37-4 by stumps on day one. Pedro Collins, who was the nightwatchman and one of the batsmen not out overnight along with Lara, thought ‘oh no, not again…’

The following day Lara scored 213, and West Indies won by ten wickets. In the next game at Bridgetown, he played what many consider the greatest Test innings of all-time, a second innings 153 not out that steered West Indies to a knife-edge victory. He made another century in the final match in Antigua, which Australia won. He had somehow salvaged everything with almost unfathomable batting. Talking about the experience of bowling to him, Jason Gillespie said: ‘You're a fraction wide and he laces you through the off side. A fraction straight? He's smacking you through midwicket. A fraction full and he's jumping on it, driving you down the ground. A fraction short, he's pulling or cutting you. There's no margin for error. When a batsman's out of nick, you feel like your margin for error for where you can land the ball is the size of a beach towel. When they're on song, it's a hand towel. With Brian in that series, it was a tissue.’

No one made big scores as regularly or as rapidly as Lara. No one could match his range of shot or ability to hit boundaries. At his best he was better than anyone, perhaps even better than the Don himself. And the Don had never been to Asylum before any of his double hundreds. As Angus Fraser, who had laboured for many hours trying to dismiss him, said: ‘you look at the top fifteen or twenty innings ever played, and this feller has made half a dozen of them.’

In those first months of 1994, and on other days too, Brian Lara had no ceiling to his talent, nothing to butt up against, no one to stop him. Unless you were old enough to have seen Bradman, there had been nothing else quite like it. We could watch it, we could describe it, we could capture it in statistics, but its nature, the nature of talent, remained elusive. How did it feel to bat that way? Ultimately, only Brian Lara could have that experience. It was enough to make you wish that time would loop and you could watch it all again, somehow knowing now what it all meant.

Shameless plug time: if you’re after more like the above, there’s plenty in Bat, Ball & Field, available here or here or in all the usual places in paperback from William Collins.