The 2007 ODI World Cup was a rather eventful one for the West Indies.
It was a tournament that, in the end, remained associated with a memory one would consider truly unforgettable.
In fact, you couldn’t fault one for calling it a double whammy of sorts.
First, it was hosted by the very team that could only go as far as the Super Eight stages, failing to make it to the “knock-out” rounds: the West Indies.
Second, it was to be the last time ever that one would get to witness a certain Brian Charles Lara amid live cricketing action.
And the date where the man dubbed “The Prince of Trinidad” was last seen holding a cricket bat in an active contest was April 21, 2007.
In a career that spanned a little over fourteen years and was peppered by mesmeric achievements with the bat that fuelled globetrotting headlines, Lara emerged as cricket’s first real superstar.
At his pomp, Brian Lara bulldozed the greatest of bowling attacks inside minutes, converting a calamitous situation into a match wining one within a session or two of batting, often alone, and more often than not, when facing crisis.
Lest it is forgotten, it were adversities that brought the best out of him.
Lara’s 400 not out, to this day Test cricket’s highest individual score, came with the series on the line and with his West Indies facing a rather embarrassing prospect of suffering a whitewash against England.
His maiden Test ton was a daddy hundred; a rollicking 277 against Australia at Sydney, where it didn’t seem as though anyone would get the better of Brian Lara.
Source– Twitter/ X
In the 2001-02 series in Sri Lanka, where his Caribbean team was fully in the doldrums, Lara kept rescuing the unwatchable plight of his team all by himself against a mighty Sri Lanka team, scoring in the process of his 688 runs from just three Tests, forty percent of the entire team’s output. Murali and Vaas rolled over the rest in the unit but found no answers to Brian Charles Lara. He made a 176 in South Africa, his 28th Test ton coming at a time where the rest of the team were perhaps its most vulnerable state in the mid 2000’s.
The lone star of the post-Viv, Haynes and Greenidge era, Lara rose at a time where not an awful lot went in his West Indies’s favour; the side kept fading in the path of overwhelming odds, however, the Trinidadian’s heroics kept twinkling the fortunes of his side.
It could be argued, what seriously makes a case for Brian Lara being cricket’s breakthrough superstar was that his triumphs came against the mightiest and often, in the most unlikeliest of circumstances.
Those who often underestimate Lara’s impact as a true colossus of batting should ask how often have Tendulkar or Ponting saved the day for their respective sides whilst battling nearly alone with a tail-ender? Lara’s 153 not out against Australia, a triumph etched amid nail biting circumstances came versus the greatest Australian cricketing side with curtly Ambrose and later, Courtney Walsh giving him company.
Combing flair and attacking instincts beautifully as only he could, the Prince of Port of Spain harangued one and all, be it Warne, McGrath, Gillespie, Lee, Shoaib, Wasim, Waqar, Saqlain, Murali, Vaas, Kumble, Srinath, Donald, Kallis and Pollock.
His blazing willow and voracious appetite for run scoring would fill stadia around the world, put fans to the edge of their seats and would paint the game with thrill and awe in equal measure, irrespective of whether you watched him bat at Johannesburg, Melbourne, Kandy, Lahore, London or anywhere else.
But it would, ultimately, be a career that would reach the end of the road amid a capacity crowd back home in the Caribbean at Bridgetown, Barbados though perhaps not in the best of ways.
On April 21, Lara wielded his bat for one final time, this time in a crucial World Cup encounter against England. He would score a quickfire 18 before pure indecisiveness on the part of Marlon Samuels’ led to his unfortunate run out; thus bringing curtains to a thrilling, as also glorious career that was marked by redemption, defined by innovation and and powered by endless courage.
Not everyone who wielded the bat back in the day for the West Indies enjoyed the element of unputdownable Caribbean supremacy; Lara’s career was bellied by a series of lows and often patches of waning or indifferent form, but ultimately circumstances from which he arose like a meteor striking the bowlers with that humongous passion for batting.
Two of his records, one each set in 1994 – first class cricket’s highest individual score of 501- and Test cricket’s highest individual score of 400 unbeaten runs- have outlived Lara’s own career. His magical batting and inspirational comebacks are still very much talked about in circles where cricket is a bigger discussion than one of its most potent subjects called the T20.
It could be argued seventeen years, 111 fifties, 53 centuries and some 22,000 international runs later, the Lara factor still very much holds relevance in cricketing circles where the most emotional fan is perhaps the nineties nostalgia-guy!