Lost In Transcription
Lost In Transcription
A final trip through the genius of Brian, via the eyes and words of others...
Almost exactly thirty years ago, Brian Lara was putting the finishing touches to a monument that will stand forever, seven weeks or so of batting that will never be repeated, concluding at Edgbaston on 6 June 1994 with his 501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham.
It’s easy to be both drawn back endlessly to those moments and to find that words and thoughts about them have become circular, repeating, over-familiar. What really is there new to say?
Jim had something, though. He’d done a piece in February for the Guardian, interviewing various people who’d come up against Lara during his streak. In it, Angus Fraser told a great story I hadn’t heard before. In 1998, Lara invited some of the England players to his house high above Port of Spain, built on land he’d been gifted by the government after his feat of scoring 375 in Antigua four years earlier.
“As we walked through the house he pointed out the rooms,” Fraser said. ‘This is the Tufnell Suite, this is the Fraser Wing, these are the Lewis kitchens and this is the Caddick lounge.’ He’d named areas of his house after the England bowlers who had ‘allowed’ him to earn the money to build such a beautiful place.”
Me and Jim wondered if we could get a piece out of that quote, but Lara was really just joking around. He probably gave the same tour to the Australians after he’d destroyed them in 1999 and said, ‘here’s the McGrath lounge, the Warne Bedroom…’
And anyway, it could never be as funny, or as rich in subconscious meaning, as the great Shane’s own house, at which he’d paid for a giant mural that depicted him having a party with, among others, Mick Jagger, JFK, Angelina Jolie and Dimitri Mascarenhas.
Then Jim found his interview with Angus Fraser that, because time was short, he’d run through one of those virtual transcription services (transcription is the great bane of any writer’s life. I estimate any interview takes three times its own length to transcribe manually, and I’ve done a lot of interviews).
He sent me the link to the transcription and something unexpectedly wonderful had happened.
When you transcribe manually it takes forever, but the payoff is that you can listen very carefully not just to what the interviewee is saying, but how they’re saying it. All of the pauses and inflections and other meanings that you might not have caught during the interview come back to you. But run it through a transcription programme and the opposite happens. The spoken words become mediated by the programme itself; they become glassy and obscure. It makes guesses at context and substance that a human would easily understand. An uncommon yet famous name like Lara, for example, comes back as ‘Laura’, something the machine feels must be logically the most likely interpretation.
And there was also the contrast between Fraser and Lara as cricketers. If Lara, whose genius, like all genius, made him in part unknowable, then Angus Fraser might be his cricketing opposite. Gus could make his first over of the day look look like it was his fiftieth, shirt poking out of his trousers as he made his effortful approach to the stumps, his expression already anticipating the long and thankless task ahead. His Eyeorish qualities were as famous as Lara’s quixotic outlook.
Gus had a wry, gimlet eye and a low-key sense of the absurdity of the game, especially as a bowler, and these, allied with the strangeness of the computer’s version of what he was saying, gave the interview a trippy quality that seemed to match the almost hallucinatory experience of bowling to one man for almost three days.
It was a weird time-capsule, and seemed as good a way as any to try and sum up that strange and faraway place that Brian Charles Lara had been able to visit.
Jim remembered Fraser talking about Lara scoring a stack of runs in the early games of the 1994 series but still wanting throwdowns during the intervals in play. Via the transcription, it came out like this:
Fraser: “I dunno where we went to, then we obviously went to, we… trying to think, the first test was in Jamaica, he got some runs, I didn't play, had a broken, but anyway, yeah, I think it was Guyana next wasn't it, actually probably would've been Guyana next. And then he batted for a long time in Jamaica and I just remember he got a hundred in Guyana, didn't he? I think I just remember him. It was at lunchtime on one of the days play and it's bloody hot. It's sort of in the tropics so I assume it's sultry. It's difficult to stop sweating, no air conditioning. It was a border ground, difficult to stop sweating. And you sat there sort of trying to get some food under one of these of fans in the middle of the room just with a towel around your waist, little beads of sweat forming every couple of minutes because you're still hot and about half an hour, well not even that, maybe even 25 minutes into the lunch break, suddenly a tap bang tap bang tap bang outside in front of the pavilion, what's going on out there and you look out – fucking in bloody throw down shit. Doesn't he get tired of batting? He's got runs in the first, a couple of seventies, 80 in the first. He's a hundred odd now or he's in the middle of a hundred, quite a big hundred, and there he is having bloody throw downs during the lunch break. He's just relentless.”
Then there was the classic exchange between Fraser and Lara when the latter has proceeded to 320 in Antigua and either accidentally or deliberately (depending on who you believe) edged Fraser through slip not once but twice in the same over:
Fraser: “It was funny though. It's quite a famous line but you can't print the language. I mean when he was on about 320, he played me twice in an over and I sort of followed through and obviously you’re about five or six yards away from him when you finished your follow through. And I just looked to him, I said, ‘I don't suppose I could call you a lucky cunt when you're on 320.’ So excuse the language.”
Jim: “No, that's good. We might be able to get it past.”
Fraser: “Say lucky fucker when you're on 320’.”
Only that other warrior of the England attack Darren Gough dismissed Lara more times than Angus Fraser, though. To conclude, here is Gus, via the machine transcription, summing up the experience of bowling to him. When you’re dealing with anything as unworldly as Brian Laura, it’s as good as we’ve got.
Valé Brian. You were the greatest of them all.
Angus Fraser: “I sort of enjoyed those contests against him. And you look back now and you look at England in the 90s to some extent and the fact that we didn't achieve a great deal or win as many series as we would've wanted to or probably expected to have done. But the fact that you were playing against, I mean he's the greatest player that I ever played against and the fact that you played against him quite a lot and pitted your wits against him was something you look back on with a huge amount of sort of pride. The fact that you were in that environment playing against an all-time great really, I mean I know everybody talks about Viv Richards and I can understand why that was. I never played against him in his pomp. And then inevitably be sort of, people say, well a certain generation will always say that Viv is the better player. And I'm not going to say one or the other is the better player, but I'll just say that Laura, he is an all-time great and he's got three of the highest, two of the highest three scores that ever been posted.”