No need to gild the lily

Brian Lara: Cricket's Troubled Genius by Brian Scovell, NPI Media Group, 224pp, £18.99

No doubt that Brian Scovell knows his subject. He ghosted Brian's Lara's Daily Mail column and his autobiography, and he has suffered for his art. Scovell's subtitle calls Lara a "troubled genius" and one of the troubles is Lara's habitual unpunctuality. Scovell was left contemplating this many times as he waited for his subject in car parks, empty flats, and outside the dressing-room door. But that is only part of the trouble. Lara, who was appointed captain of West Indies three times, has been sacked twice. Scovell provides plenty of evidence of truculence, selfishness and disloyalty.

On the other hand Lara has recorded the highest scores in Test and first-class cricket, and scored more Test runs than any other batsman, ever. But statistics paint only part of the picture. "I've enjoyed bringing a smile to people's faces," Lara says, and he has done that many times wherever he has played. "Not a man move" was the way West Indian fans greeted a perfectly timed drive through extra cover. The biggest smile of all was brought on by Lara's 153 not out out of a winning 311 for 9 in West Indies' win over Australia at the Kensington Oval in 1999. Peter Roebuck called it one of the greatest innings in the history of the game.

Lara's life is such a compelling story that it is unnecessary to gild the lily, but Scovell cannot resist investing his subject with more significance than even he deserves. The first chapter is titled "The Greatest?" and Scovell is suggesting that his man could be even better than Don Bradman. "They are a Club of Two," he writes. He skates over the difference in their Test averages (52.88 against Bradman's 99.94), though, to be fair, he does quote Neil Harvey's demolition of this dubious thesis: "[Lara's] got covered wickets, you've got flat wickets, you've got ridiculously short boundaries, and you've got jet-propelled bats." There is no contest, surely. It is better to stick with Allan Border's judgment: "A genuine genius. I would rank him as one of the best three batsmen in the world."

Even more remarkable is Scovell's contention that Lara, on retirement, could have a political career. He quotes a friend: "I think he could become Prime Minister of Trinidad eventually." Scovell's considered verdict is: "With the right backing, he would have a good chance, if he felt up to it." On the evidence, Lara would alienate the right backing and would soon decide that he did not feel up to it.

There is a flaw in the crystal, and Scovell's account of the life suggests an obsessive child with a wonderful, natural eye, who used a ruler to hit a marble against the side of his family house. He was so good that he began to feel a deep-seated anger at being taken at less than his valuation of himself. He thought West Indies' selectors were slow to recognise him; he dissed Courtney Walsh and Richie Richardson when they were his captains. He found it hard to adjust to the comparative banality of county cricket. (Scovell reminds us that Warwickshire would have preferred Manoj Prabhakar - who he? - to Lara as their overseas player in 1994.) When he returned to Edgbaston as captain, Lara was not a success. Bob Woolmer noted shrewdly: "I felt he was a charismatic man but not a real leader."

Scovell's biography is a hurried piece of work. (He was unlucky to have completed it weeks before Lara's retirement was forced on him by the West Indies selectors.) It is not a considered life. Like many biographies of this kind, it is repetitive, poorly edited, and there is no index.

Fans will enjoy reliving Lara's triumphs, and researchers will find this is a useful first draft of the biography of one of cricket's greatest enigmas. But I can't help feeling that Scovell, and other writers who dabble in this trade, would do much better if they halved their output and doubled their fees. Much less could be so much more.

This review was first published in the September 2007 edition of The Wisden Cricketer