Fly Lara fly
The method behind the genius, the early-morning vision behind the epicshttp://www.thecricketmonthly.com/story/954549/fly-lara-flyRAHUL BHATTACHARYA | JANUARY 2016
Lara is a beautiful name. Rhythmic, small and epic. It is a classic film theme, an animated heroine, and in cricket it is a poem that sings like a song. Like in Jean "Binta" Breeze's "Song for Lara":
if de bowler fine a reason
ah will answer wid a rhyme
any kine a riddim
in mi own time The answers in any kind of riddim, the innings orchestral. They beat about the body, stay in the system. Like steel band resonation, like the Renegades doing "Pan in a Rage", or "Four Lara Four" for that matter, batting that vibrates long after it is over, slowing perhaps but never coming to a stop.
That is one way (though only one) of thinking about the results of the Cricket Monthly exercise. It's a list tingling with the Lara sensation. Consider his rough contemporaries who have no entries in the 50: Sanga, Jayawardene, Inzamam, Chanderpaul, Hayden, Kirsten, Ponting, Kallis, Tendulkar. Lara? Four. For the 50 years in consideration, nobody has as many, batsman, bowler or allrounder. Four Lara Four! All four in the top 30, three in the top 20, one of those in the top five: 153 not out in Barbados.
Over their history West Indies rarely lost a Test in Barbados, and Barbados really is no place to lose a Test. There, in a taxi or in a bar they shred your pretensions
This is an article about remembering Lara and what I remembered is something that he remembered when I interviewed him in 2002 and which I had been curious about ever since.
I also remember one of my good school friends, Nicholas Gomez, giving me a book on Michael Jordan. He had an entire page on how he went about visualising what's going to happen in a game. I tried that sort of method for a while, I've seen that the success rate is very, very good. Before my 153 not out against Australia in Barbados, I remember calling my friend Gomez, the same guy who gave me the book. Six o'clock in the morning, the last morning of the Test match and we went about planning this innings against the best team in the world. And it was amazing to see how it just came to fruition.
So I got in touch with Nicholas Gomez in Trinidad and asked him to remember it. Before Barbados was Jamaica and before Jamaica is where we begin.
When Nicholas Gomez received the call at home on March 12, 1999, the following things had already happened. Lara had almost not taken West Indies to South Africa over a pay fight ; Lara had overseen a 5-0 defeat there. Lara was placed on "probation" against Australia and West Indies responded by falling for 51 before his home crowd in Port-of-Spain, their lowest total at the time. And now he was in Jamaica, where public opinion was doubly ranged against him, because he was seen to have hustled their man Courtney Walsh out of the captaincy.
Gomez's phone rang and it was Brian Lara. "He calls me and he says, 'I'm really, really down. I don't know if I'm taking the field tomorrow.' I'm thinking, that's a serious t'ing going on! 'What!' I tell him, 'Let's talk this through.' We spend an hour on the phone. He says, 'I have to go to a team meeting now but could I call you back?' I say, 'Sure, Brian, anytime.' I jump off the phone and I say to myself, I need to think what to do. So I made a decision that I am going to go to the airport at 4.30 the next morning, I'm going to try and get a ticket, get on a flight and go to Jamaica, right."
Gomez was then in his mid-30s, nine years into a career with Ernst & Young Trinidad & Tobago, where he had just become partner. He knew Lara from the days of Fatima College, which is, in fact, a secondary school. Back when "Brian was a very, very small, minute, little individual" with "arms as slim as - you cannot imagine how small". When Gomez was 17 and Fatima cricket captain and Lara was 13 and had already broken into the first team. Gomez remembers a match from that time. The top order had gone for nothing but at the bottom, which was the only place he got to bat, little Lara held up an end re-mark-ably, to use Gomez's emphasis. "He was so small that he couldn't drive the ball past cover." So he got all his runs with deflections and manoeuvres and in this way got himself close to a hundred. Time was running out and the school principal was watching from the stands, but Gomez found it hard to declare the innings. In the big picture, a first hundred for the prodigy would be more valuable than anything the declaration would achieve. So he didn't. Lara got the century, Fatima got their opponents to nine down, missed the outright victory.
Read More;
http://www.thecricketmonthly.com/story/954549/fly-lara-fly.
