‘Impossible to bowl to’: Brian Lara’s record feats still stand out 30 years on

West Indies great’s heroics in 1994 are recalled by opponents – some of whom had rooms in Lara’s house named after them

St John’s Recreation Ground, Antigua. At 11.46am on 18 April 1994 – 30 years next week – Brian Lara pulls a Chris Lewis short ball to the leg side boundary and cricketing history is written. Garfield Sobers’ record Test score of 365 runs had stood firm for 36 years, a “North Wall” of batsmanship seemingly insurmountable. That’s until a 24-year-old Lara scaled and surpassed it in only his 16th Test.

The scenes and stories that followed have become indelible: the jubilant crowd spilling on to the pitch, Sir Garry strolling through them to anoint the new record holder and crown prince of West Indian batting, Lara kneeling to plant a kiss on the biscuit-coloured wicket. The off bail, unnoticed by all except the wicketkeeper, Jack Russell, resting just outside of its groove after Lara had grazed his own stumps while swatting Lewis away. “I remember the dilemma as if it was yesterday”, Russell recalls with a chuckle. “‘If it falls off I’m going to have to appeal, here.’ I don’t reckon I’d have made it off the island.”

The ball, remarkably, was also left untouched and ignored, resting by the advertising hoardings until play resumed some 20 minutes later. Aptly perhaps, as this moment was all about the dominance of the bat. The genius of Lara.

Lara seemed to arrive in Test cricket fully formed. In only his fifth Test he scored 277 runs against Australia in Sydney. His emphatic periscope backlift allowing him to hit the ball with the power of a trebuchet, he possessed Swiss-Clock timing and the seeming ability to hit the ball exactly where he wanted at will.

Mike Atherton, the England captain during the 375 innings in 1994, tells a story about taking slip out for the first time when Lara was on 291 only for Lara to edge the ball through the vacant area the very next ball. “He could quite conceivably have been taking the mickey … I wouldn’t know because the scale of his talent was way outside my understanding.”

Angus Fraser and Chris Lewis bowled a collective 76 overs at Lara during the innings; they agree with Atherton, each explaining that Lara was a nightmare to bowl to because he could hit a carbon copy delivery to seemingly any area of the ground that he so desired. Fraser – his trusty flannel tucked into the back of his trousers giving him the air of a harried waiter at the best of times during bustling and lengthy spells for England – says bowling to Lara was an altogether new level of frustration. “His level was unfathomable” he remembers, “just impossible to bowl at and he could make you look a fool.”

The 375 innings changed Lara’s life. Increased attention and riches duly followed. He was gifted a prime plot of land by the Trinidadian government to build a house. Amusingly, Fraser remembers that four years later Lara invited the touring England side up to the awe-inspiring property for a drink and a tour. The nomenclature of the rooms raised an eyebrow. “As we walked through it he pointed out the rooms, ‘This is the Tufnell Suite, this is the Fraser Wing, these are the Lewis kitchens and this is the Caddick lounge.’ He’d named areas of his house after the England bowlers who had ‘allowed’ him to earn the money to build such a beautiful place.”

As well as fame and fortune, something even more intangible followed the 375 knock: form. The next day after the completion of the match in Antigua, Lara was flown to England where he signed a £40,000 contract to play for Warwickshire. It was a sum a modern player could make while blinking in the Indian Premier League but a huge fee at the time. Lara didn’t disappoint. What followed was a wellspring of runs, a purple patch of batting that remains one of the greatest the game has ever witnessed.

Take a deep breath. On April 29, in his first innings after Antigua, Lara hit 147 runs from 160 balls against Glamorgan. The following week he scored 106 and 120 not out against Leicestershire. Next up, 136 off 72 balls against Somerset. Lara had now made five hundreds in five innings – only Don Bradman, CB Fry and Mike Procter had made six in six. It seemed fated Lara would join and then surpass them to stand apart.

Middlesex’s Richard Johnson had other ideas. He dismissed Lara for 26.

“I’d love to say it was part of a plan, in truth we had no plans at all for Brian, how could you?” laughs Johnson, now head coach at the county. The former seamer was only 19 at the time, with only a handful of first-class games under his belt. What of the delivery? The one that stopped Lara in his century-making tracks?

“It isn’t that glamorous I’m afraid to say! It was a legside strangle … he somehow nudged me behind and was caught. I’d love to say I nicked him off, that it was a great piece of bowling, but it wasn’t.”

Johnson’s abiding memory is of the circus that surrounded Lara at the time, “The following day The Sun’s back page had a picture of me and Lara with the headline ‘Tricky Dicky Makes Lara Sicky’. My mum’s got that one framed somewhere.”

Johnson’s wicket made Lara mortal but it was only a blip. In a way it made what happened next all the more remarkable. Lara scored 140 in the second innings against Middlesex and then headed back to Edgbaston to play against Durham. Four days later he had scored 501 not out. In less than eight weeks Brian Lara had the highest score in both Test and first-class cricket. Thirty years on, he still does.

Arrangements of White on Green

According to Richard Johnson, Lara’s 501 not out was being discussed in hushed tones just this past week as Glamorgan’s Sam Northeast racked up the runs at Lord’s. Northeast went past Graham Gooch’s record of 333 at the ground and remained unbeaten on 335 but the 501 was never really in any danger. Perhaps it never will be.

The writer and author Jon Hotten evokes beautifully on Lara and that golden few weeks of batting in his book Bat, Ball and Field: “In those first months of 1994, and on other days too, Brian Lara had no ceiling to his talent, nothing to butt up against, nothing to stop him. Unless you were old enough to have seen Bradman, there had been nothing else quite like it. We could watch it, we could describe it, we could capture it in statistics, but it’s nature, the nature of talent, remained elusive. How did it feel to bat that way? Only Brian Lara could have the experience. It was enough to make you wish that time would loop and you could watch it all again, somehow knowing this time what it meant.”

Makes you wonder why bother at all, not at batting or bowling, but at writing about cricket. Well, if you can’t beat em … cling on to the feathers of their quill and strong-arm them into a collaboration. Jon and I have just launched Arrangements of White on Green, a home for delving into the more esoteric pastures of the game, the cricketing hinterlands and beyond. We’d love you to give it a whirl, it might just be in Spin readers’ sweet spot.

Quote of the week

“We are now going to have the funding to be able to get to the kids, give them hubs in areas where they can thrive, and I think we are going to see a real seminal moment for cricket” – Ebony Rainford-Brent on the £35m investment for the grassroots game announced by the government this week.

Memory lane

While Waqar Younis celebrates the final wicket of the match – Curtly Ambrose bowled for a duck – his Pakistan teammates duel it out to collect a commemorative stump. The occasion is a historic one, a thumping win at Rawalpindi in December 1997 sealing Pakistan’s second Test series victory over the West Indies and first in 38 years. Right at the back is Inzamam-ul-Haq, who certainly deserves a gift after top-scoring in Pakistan’s only innings with 177. The hosts were utterly dominant across three Tests, the first two won by an innings and the final by 10 wickets. Wasim Akram’s left-arm mastery led in the wickets column, with 17 at 17.29, while Aamer Sohail propped up the batting with two centuries.

Still want more?

Here’s Gary Naylor with the talking points from the opening round of fixtures in the County Championship.

England’s tour of New Zealand ended in disappointment with a seven-wicket loss in the final one-day international but the series win took them up to third in the ICC rankings, reports Raf Nicholson.

And Jofra Archer has been ruled out of Tests for England this summer so he can focus on white-ball cricket.

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