S Berry; Lara now the captain who has everything (5 April 1998)

5 April 1998

Lara now the captain who has everything

By Scyld Berry

IN less than a fortnight 17 first-class counties will enter the brave new world of Lord MacLaurin's reforms. They will be striving might and main to finish in the top half of the County Championship so that they can qualify for next year's Super Cup, another one-day knock-out dreamed up by HQ (please excuse me while I yawn), and in the top half of the Sunday League so that they will qualify for the upper division of next year's 50-over National League.

The 18th county, Warwickshire, will offer a taste of a rather more relaxed and bygone era. Under the captaincy of Brian Lara, the scene at Edgbaston will surely hark back to the years of amateur skippers who had bags of initials, money and style.

Perhaps a spot of shooting before the match, what-ho? Certainly a round of golf, absolutely. And if it's an away match, let's round up a couple of popsies to take along in the back, and if we don't get there before the start, what the deuce!

Had Courtney Walsh still been captain of the West Indies, Warwickshire's appointment of Lara as their captain would have been an undeniable masterstroke. He would have been highly motivated to show them that he should be given the West Indies job. But now that Lara has what he has always wanted, there is sure to be an interesting tension between the most laid-back of overseas players and the most professional of counties - quite possibly a creative one.

The tension should not be as grating as it was in 1994, at any rate. Then the novelty of county cricket wore off quickly, and a prodigy at the piano found he was bored when stuck with the drums and triangle. The rest of the orchestra was not too happy either at the ever more dischordant note which Lara struck.

When he joined Warwickshire immediately after scoring his 375, he was so hungry that he was sometimes practising on the outfield in the lunch interval. His first seven innings in the championship were 147, 106, 120*, 136, 26, 140 and 501*: 1,176 runs, which were scored, what is more, from 1,175 balls.

Not surprisingly Lara became sated. In the remainder of the championship season he made three more hundreds. In the three limited-overs competitions he did not make one; his highest in them was 81, not coincidentally on the biggest occasion, the NatWest Trophy final at Lord's. For joie de vivre, his fielding that summer could not have been confused with Derek Randall's, on the occasions when Lara took the field, that is.

Behind the scenes, too, the lessening of commitment was increasingly apparent, sometimes hilariously so, except if you were the captain Dermot Reeve or the coach Bob Woolmer: soon the heavy roller was not enough to de-furrow their brows. When one of Warwickshire's home matches started, Lara was discovered to be on the motorway, driving a Trinidadian popsy back from Heathrow.

Warwickshire had to win their last Sunday League match of the season, away to Gloucestershire, to take the title. To be fair, Lara arrived only just before the start largely because he had lost his way from Birmingham. But the point was that all the other players had stayed overnight in Bristol, while Lara had pleaded for and gained special permission to stay in Birmingham and drive down in the morning.

He was no more punctual with the newspaper which contracted him. When his 'ghost' managed to meet him one day at Edgbaston to do a column, Lara said he just had to do something first in the dressing-room. The ghost waited, and waited. When he finally inquired in the dressing-room, he learnt that Lara had gone off to Trinidad.

It was all done with princely charm, and the most winning of smiles. Some rounds of golf with the powers that are at Edgbaston also helped to keep him in passable odour and to secure an invitation to return one day. As captain, naturally. Brian Charles Lara, holder of Trinidad's Humming Bird medal and Trinity Cross, was not born to the ranks. The undertaking to this season's designated captain Tim Munton, that he had until Christmas to prove his fitness, was set aside.

And Lara's display during the recent Test series indicated that he is far more at ease now that he has fulfilled his life's ambition. He gave everything that he had against England, which might not have quite been the case in the previous series in Pakistan under Walsh, even if that 'everything' is not as much as it was four years ago, before the record-breaking.

His man-management was exceptional in that he re-united the West Indian team in the tradition of Frank Worrell and Clive Lloyd, albeit in a New Age touchy-feely fashion. A careless captain could have lost Curtly Ambrose and Walsh to retirement. Lara's communication skill helped to ensure that the West Indian pace bowling was decisively stronger than England's.

His on-field captaincy was never conventional or formulaic, like that of several of his predecessors. It combined thought, imagination and luck, and usually worked. If anything he was too keen to be seen as different from his predecessors; and he appears to get bored at first slip, having done almost everything in cricket.

The impatience shows in his batting even more. He got on top of England's bowling in Guyana and Antigua, and was surging towards his hundred. Most batsmen would have throttled down through the nineties then picked up the pace again. Lara got out to screamers, for 93 and 89, skimming a drive to extra-cover and lashing a pull to midwicket. It was not a coaching book which once said, ''twere well it were done quickly'. If Lara has to play county cricket, to enhance his earnings rather than his game, there is no doubt that Warwickshire - without Reeve now, and Woolmer - is the county best suited to him. Last year they managed without an official captain, as Munton was injured. They have had to undertake their pre-season tour to Bloemfontein without Lara too.

Warwickshire have so many capable cricketers - and the best-drilled and most self-motivated of any county - they will supply a substantial cake on top of which Lara can squirt his icing as and when he feels. And if he himself is not utterly committed from April 17, when Durham visit Edgbaston, to the last day of the season on Sept 20, and he loses a little interest when the winning stops and the patience of his players starts to fray, we can be sure that the shades of some earlier Warwickshire captains, like Hon F S G Calthorpe, will forgive him.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)