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Lara the batting legend


BRIAN LARA, born May 2, 1969, was a genius with the willow, a left-handed legend the likes of whom grace the world once in a generation.

It has not been that long since Brian Lara’s majestic willow stopped etching those majestic arcs from the high back lift to flourishing follow-throughs.The image of the bent knee and the body and bat coiled like a spring are still fresh in memory, as are the flashes of energy bursting forth, the sound of willow against leather like the pop of the champagne cork, strokes gushing out in liquid grace, flowing in red streaks across the field to the boundary.

No man in world cricket made batting look so sublime, so indelibly stamped with genius. If Sachin Tendulkar’s mastery was sculpted by layers of prodigious inspiration built on a platform of the soundest edicts of batsmanship, Brian Lara more or less wrote his own training manuals. With Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting, the basics of their craft could be at least imitated by mortals, although the results and consistency would be way beyond the realm of lesser men. However, when it came to Lara, even efforts at mirroring were beyond the best of them. The twinkling of the toes as he went down to meet the ball, the pull played with a straight bat with both feet off the ground, the angled bat finding gaps through the off side again and again and again. When the man himself advised Ramnaresh Sarwan to ‘Just watch how I do it’, even the undoubted credentials of the other Guyanese batsman failed to do so.