St John’s Recreation Ground, Antigua. At 11.46am on April 18, 1994 – 30 years next week – Brian Lara pulled a short ball from Chris Lewis to the leg-side boundary and cricket history was made. Garfield Sobers’ record Test score of 365 runs had stood for 36 years, a ‘north wall’ of batting seemingly insurmountable. That is until a 24-year-old Lara reached and surpassed this scale in just his 16th test.
The scenes and stories that followed have become indelible: the cheering crowd streaming onto the field, Sir Garry strolling through to anoint the new record holder and crown prince of West Indian batting, Lara kneeling to plant a kiss on the biscuit colored wicket . The released bail, unnoticed by all but the wicketkeeper, Jack Russell, who rested just outside the groove after Lara had scraped his own stumps while batting away Lewis. “I remember the dilemma like it was yesterday,” Russell recalls with a chuckle. ‘If it doesn’t go through, I’ll have to appeal here.’ I don’t think I could have left the island.”
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Remarkably, the ball was also left untouched and ignored, remaining near the advertising hoardings until play resumed some twenty minutes later. Appropriate perhaps, because this moment was all about the bat’s dominance. Lara’s genius.
Lara seemed to arrive in Test cricket fully formed. In just his fifth Test, he scored 277 runs against Australia in Sydney. His emphatic periscope backlift allowing him to hit the ball with the force of a trebuchet, he possessed the timing of the Swiss clock and the apparent ability to hit the ball exactly where he wanted.
Mike Atherton, England’s 375-innings captain in 1994, tells a story about slipping for the first time when Lara was on 291, allowing Lara to slide the ball through the empty area the next ball. “It’s entirely possible he took the mickey…I wouldn’t know because the extent of his talent was far beyond my understanding.”
Angus Fraser and Chris Lewis bowled a combined 76 overs to Lara during the innings; they agree with Atherton and all explain that Lara was a nightmare to get to because he could deliver a copy to seemingly any part of the ground he wanted. Fraser – his trusty flannel tucked into the back of his trousers giving him the air of a harried waiter at the best of times during busy and extended spells for England – says bowling was a whole new level of frustration for Lara. “His level was unfathomable,” he recalls, “just impossible to bowl to and he could make a fool of you.”
The 375 innings changed Lara’s life. More attention and wealth duly followed. He was gifted an excellent piece of land by the Trinidadian government to build a house. Funnily enough, Fraser recalls that four years later Lara invited the touring English side to the awe-inspiring property for a drink and a tour. The nomenclature of the rooms raised an eyebrow. ‘As we walked through he pointed to the rooms: ‘This is the Tufnell Suite, this is the Fraser Wing, these are the Lewis kitchens and this is the Caddick lounge.’ He had parts of his house named after the English bowlers who ‘allowed’ him to earn the money to build such a beautiful place.’
Besides fame and fortune, something more elusive followed the 375 knock: form. The next day after the completion of the match in Antigua, Lara was flown to England where he signed a £40,000 contract to play for Warwickshire. It was an amount that a modern player could earn while playing with his eyes in the Indian Premier League, but a huge amount at the time. Lara did not disappoint. What followed was a fountain of runs, a purple battlefield that remains one of the best the game has ever seen.
Take a deep breath. On 29 April, in his first innings after Antigua, Lara hit 147 runs from 160 balls against Glamorgan. The following week he scored 106 and 120 not out against Leicestershire. Then 136 off 72 balls against Somerset. Lara had now made five hundreds in five innings – only Don Bradman, CB Fry and Mike Procter had made six in six. It looked like Lara would join and then surpass them to stand apart.
Richard Johnson of Middlesex had other ideas. He dismissed Lara for 26.
“I’d like to say it was part of a plan. In reality, we had no plans at all with Brian, how could you?” laughs Johnson, now head coach at the province. The former seamer was just 19 at the time and had only a handful of first-class games to his name. What about delivery? The one who stopped Lara in his century-making songs?
‘It’s not that glamorous, I dare say! It was a choke on the leg side…he somehow pushed me behind him and got caught. I’d like to say I took it away, that it was a great piece of bowling, but it wasn’t.
Johnson’s lasting memory is of the circus that surrounded Lara at the time: ‘The next day on the back page of The Sun there was a photo of me and Lara with the headline ‘Tricky Dicky Makes Lara Sicky’. My mother has it framed somewhere.’
Johnson’s wicket made Lara mortal, but it was just a blip. In a way, it made what happened next all the more remarkable. Lara scored 140 in the second innings against Middlesex and then returned to Edgbaston to play Durham. Four days later he had scored 501 not out. In less than eight weeks, Brian Lara had the highest score in both Test and first-class cricket. Thirty years later he still does that.
Arrangements from White on Green
According to Richard Johnson, Lara’s 501 not out was discussed in hushed tones last week when Glamorgan’s Sam Northeast picked up the points at Lord’s. Northeast passed Graham Gooch’s record of 333 on the ground and remained undefeated at 335, but the 501 was never really in danger. Maybe that will never be the case.
The writer and author Jon Hotten gives a wonderful account of Lara and those golden few weeks of batting in his book Bat, Ball and Field: ‘In those first months of 1994, and on other days too, Brian Lara had no ceiling on his talent, nothing. to bump into, nothing will stop him. Unless you were old enough to have seen Bradman, there would have been nothing like it. We could look at 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 hit like that? Only Brian Lara could have this experience. It was enough to make you wish time would keep repeating and you could watch it all again, this time somehow knowing what it meant.
It makes you wonder why you bother at all, not with batting or bowling, but with writing about cricket. Well, if you can’t beat them… then hold on to their feathers and arm them into cooperation. Jon and I have just launched Arrangements of White on Green, a home where you can delve into the more esoteric pastures of the game, the cricket hinterland and beyond. We’d love you to give it a try, maybe it’s in the sweet spot of Spin readers.
Quote of the week
“We’re now going to get the funding to be able to reach the kids, give them hubs in areas where they can thrive, and I think we’re going to see a real game-changing moment for cricket” – Ebony Rainford-Brent on the £ Investment website 35 million for the grassroots game announced by the government this week.
Memory strip
As Waqar Younis celebrates the last wicket of the match – Curtly Ambrose bowled for a duck – his Pakistani teammates duel it to collect a memorial stump. The occasion is historic: a thumping victory in Rawalpindi in December 1997, which sealed Pakistan’s second Test series victory over the West Indies, and the first in 38 years. At right back is Inzamam-ul-Haq, who certainly deserves a gift after top-scoring 177 in Pakistan’s only innings. The hosts were utterly dominant over three Tests, winning the first two by one innings and the final by 10 wickets. Wasim Akram’s left-arm control led in the wickets column, with 17 at 5.29, while Aamer Sohail backed the batting with two centuries.
Do you want more?
Here’s Gary Naylor with the talking points from the opening round of the County Championship.
England’s tour of New Zealand ended in disappointment with a seven-wicket loss in the final one-day international, but the series win moved them to third in the ICC rankings, reports Raf Nicholson.
And Jofra Archer has been ruled out of Tests for England this summer so he can concentrate on white-ball cricket.
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