Brian Lara is one of those cricketers that I enjoyed watching the most. Brian Lara was undoubtedly the most accomplished batsman of his time. There have been quite a few great batsmen in the last two decades, but Brian Lara was the best of them all. It was always pleasing to watch Brian Lara batting.
Brian Lara played for West Indies when the West Indies cricket was at its nadir. Still Brian Lara has a unique distinction of being the only player to have scored 400 in test cricket history, and is one of the only four cricketers to have gone past 300 mark twice in his career, and is among the batsmen who have scored most number of double hundreds. He is also one and only to have scored a 500 in first class cricket.
These scores of 500, 400, 300s, 200s not only justify Brian Lara as the greatest batsman of his time, but also one of the five greatest batsmen of all time across all formats of the game. Moreover he was equally effective across all formats of the game. He could play longer innings as the his huge scores suggested in test cricket as well as could score quickly required to succeed in shorter formats of the game. Lara was also one of the most stylish cricketer the game has ever produced.
He dominated the best bowlers of his time. He scored breathtaking double hundreds against Australia, which had all time great bowler like Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne, and express pace Brett Lee in their bowling line up. He also scored a match winning 153 in the fourth innings of a test match against Australia, which included one of the greatest fast bowler of all time McGrath in their line up. Brian Lara scored an array of hundred on his tour of Sri Lanka and dominated the best off spinner the world has ever seen, Muthia Muralitharan throughout the series. Those performances prompted Murali to say that Brian Lara was the best batsman in the world. Murali rated Lara the best batsman among all the batsman he bowled against.
Brian Lara also has a distinction of being among the top players to have scored most number of runs in an over on a couple of occasions. He dominated all the great spin bowlers of his time, and two of them, Shane Warne and Muralitharan are of course considered as the greatest spine bowlers of all time. He clobbered Shane Warne during his encounters against Australia when he notched hundreds and double hundreds, pounded Muralitharan during his couple of double hundreds and hundres against Sri Lanka, and completely dismissed Danish Kaneria and hit him to all parts of the ground and into the stadium repeatedly during his tour to Pakistan. At that time, one of the best batsman of modern times, Mohammad Yusuf described Brian Lara as the greatest batsman of modern times.
Had Brian Lara played for a stronger West Indian team or for that matter any stronger team, he would have achieved much more than what he eventually did. Being part of good team always help a player to improve his own performance. One can see the decline in Ricky Ponting's batting in the last couple of years after some of the greats of Australia retired during this time. One can also see the improvement in Sachin's batting with some great talent around him, especially with the flourishing of players like Sehwag, Dhoni, Gambhir, and Laxman in batting around him in the last couple of years. Cricket fans will always miss Brian Lara as a batsman, but his position as the greatest test batsman of the last two decades and one of the greatest of all time is undebatable.
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