Lara's Crown Slipped but He Regained it in Style With a Masterclass Against Aussies

Garfield Robinson charts a slump in the career of one of cricket’s greatest batsmen and how he managed to turn it around.

- Garfield Robinson

By any measure Brian Lara was a great batsman –one of the greatest ever. Yet there was a period,lasting more then three years, when he was not the avaricious run-maker we all knew he was.

His Test career average is 53.17. But from the time of the West Indies’ tour of India in late 1994 to the South African visit that ended in February 1999, he averaged just over 44 runs per innings.

For most this would have been a very respectable run. But the Trinidadian was no ordinary player. That period was one of underachievement.

As Lara said in an ITV interview some years ago: “You could really and truly divide my career in three stages: pre1995, that period between ’95 and early ’99, and the remainder. If you look at my batting you would see that the first and the third part being very, very good, up there with the best. And then obviously the middle period was something that sort of dragged me down.”

Setting a field to the little left-hander, while in full flight, was a perfunctory exercise captains engaged in simply to fulfil their role. There was scarcely any hope of containing him. He, more than any other player of his time, had the ability to make fielding a futile exercise.

AB de Villiers and Virat Kohli both have an almost limitless repertoire of strokes, but it is difficult to imagine any batsman possessing a wider range than Lara. His degree of precision was such that it is only a mild exaggeration to say he could hit any patch of grass for which he aimed.

It was a skill he spent hours honing as a boy. It apparently grew from the mock Test-matches he played on his porch “using a broom handle or a stick as the bat and a marble as the ball. I would arrange the pot plants to represent fielders and try to find the gaps as I played my shots”.