The St. John’s ground at Antigua looks like a ground made for batting records.
Last year Brian Lara recaptured the highest individual score mark he had lost to Matthew Hayden a few months earlier and now this year a new record is set with the most number of centuries in a single Test match with no less than 8 batsmen scoring tons.
Brian Lara had in 1995 got the highest score in Test cricket by scoring 375 to eclipse Sir Garfield Sobers long standing record of 365 made in 1958-59.
That a fast bowler and one of the most shrewd of them, Andy Roberts is the curator of the pitch at St. John’s Antigua seems hard to believe, for no fast bowlers would want to bowl on a pitch as good as the one at Antigua.
Apparently, having lost the previous two Tests the West Indians asked for no grass to be left on the pitch and so a real beauty for batsmen was the one that helped produce 8 hundreds in the Test including a triple century by Chris Gayle.
Gayle had not been in the best form coming into this Test match. He had missed the first Test due to the contractual dispute in the West Indies Board.
Then in the next two Tests he barely troubled the scorers and there was a question mark against his name for future selections. He has bounced back and how! By scoring a triple ton he has shown that batsmen must make up for past failures by capitalizing when the going is good for them.
More importantly he has spontaneously acknowledged the help he received from Sir Garfield Sobers who has been appointed the Technical Consultant for the West Indies team. Gayle mentioned how Sir Garfield worked on his balance and how that made a difference for him to transform from the struggler of the previous two Tests to the striker in this last Test.
Gayle’s statement is in stark contrast to others especially from the subcontinent who rarely if ever acknowledge the advice and work put in by their former players and only praise foreign players advice.
Mind you the West Indies also have a foreigner Bennet King as a coach, still Gayle acknowledged not King but Sobers and that is a telling comment.
The West Indians have always had their own brand of cricket and there have been a number of truly great players but the greatest of them all and that includes the rest of the world has been Garfield Sobers.
Unfortunately the West Indians have hardly ever used his genius to help out the team.
Sir Garfield was the one who first imbibed in the Sri Lankans the belief that they were fit to play international cricket and they should have no complexes and fears about other teams.
Dav Whatmore reaped the benefits of the seeds sown by Sir Gary.
What one must understand is that a full time coaching job may not appeal to great players like Sir Gary but ask them to help on a series by series basis and they will be only too happy to help their teams. Ridley Jacobs, the former West Indian keeper who retired could also have helped his team if he had kept his mouth shut rather than accusing Brian Lara of being selfish. If he has been quoted accurately then Jacobs shows a streak of jealousy more than anything else.
His remark that “you can’t be captain and always in the spotlight” shows that streak quite clearly.
If Jacob hasn’t noticed the captains of all the teams are invariably in the spotlight and if the captain also happens to be a champion player like Lara than the spotlight is even greater.
Has Jacobs ever tried to understand what it must feel to be always in the spotlight and not be able to do the ordinary things that everybody else does without someone trying to find out how and why.
There will always be some players more popular with the media and the public than the others in the team and the public curiosity to know more about these players will mean they will be the ones who will feature in the media even if they are not the best players in the team. David Beckham is an example who gets more media coverage than Ronaldo or Zidane. Anna Kournikova who is not even playing these days still gets more than a fair share of the media spotlight and even if Agassi is not winning anything major isn’t his photograph in the papers every day? So the spotlight is not upto the players but the media and to blame Lara for that is ridiculous....
Jacobs then takes the cake by claming himself that “When I play cricket, I don’t play for myself.
I play for the people first”.
Wow! That is patting one’s own back.
Well if he had thought of his people first then he should have voiced his views on Lara while he was still playing and not after he has retired. After all it’s only when you put your neck on the chopping block that you show your true colors and not after you have retired to the background.
If you have the courage of your convictions then speak out when it matters not after retreating into safe territory. Unless Jacobs qualifies his remarks with concrete examples of Lara’s selfishness most of the cricketing world will take his remarks as yet another dropped catch by a player who was more irongloves and a goalkeeper then a genuine wicketkeeper. If there’s still a bit of interest left in West Indies cricket it is to a major extent due to Brian Lara.
When he comes in to bat people still drop everything they are doing to watch for as he nears retiring age he is still producing some breathtaking shots and making batting look ridiculously easy. By the way just to refresh memories, although Brian Lara was cleared by the West Indies Board to play the first Test of the series in spite of the dispute between the board and the West Indies Players’ Association, he declined to do so unless the others like Gayle, Sarwan, Bravo were also considered for selection.
Since the board refused to do so, Lara too stepped aside and did not play the first Test. Selfish, who, Lara? Tell us another one?
