It was immensely satisfying that Brian Lara reclaimed his world record for the highest score in Test history in Antigua this week, but his 12-hour mugging of England’s bowlers was remarkable not for its gluttony but for its familiarity.
Ten years ago to the week, and at the same venue, Lara helped himself to similar fare from a similar English team. Hearts of oak only went so far in the swelter of Antigua, and they died the death of a thousand cuts from a wisp of willow.
It was a fiercely solipsistic innings, Lara looking more like a solo climber on the South Col without oxygen than a cricketer, and when he pulled Chris Lewis over midwicket to pass Gary Sobers’s record, he seemed startled by the presence of the crowd that surged on to the field, and his smiles were shy and terribly tired.
It had been a magnificent demolition of a team by a 24-year-old in the form of his life, but it was not surprising. The pitch was flat, Gus Fraser’s great flapping feet were sore and blistered, and most of his fellow bowlers seemed to be working on the principle that if they gave Lara enough half-volleys outside off-stump he’d nick one at some stage.
By the time they twigged and started bowling short, he was in that unique space that batsmen inhabit once in a career, where the bat picks the shot and the only question is whether the ball will bounce once or twice before it smacks into the wall behind extra-cover.
In short, it had been expected from the boy who had played imaginary Tests in his family’s little yard as a boy in Trinidad, hitting marbles over the fence with a 1cm-thick piece of dowelling. It was only a matter of time, the pundits realised, when he carved 277 off Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath in Sydney, for a maiden Test hundred.
But after that reverberating but enervating 375, and the almost surreal 501 not out for Warwickshire in the same season, it became clear that Lara’s demons could no longer be sated with runs and records and now needed more to pacify them.
His subsequent decline, in which his batting fluctuated between ennui and a frenzied desperation, coincided with the implosion of the West Indies. Whether the two were related is possible, but conversely it seemed that the few moments of respectability won by the team were owing to Lara.
Nonetheless, even his most ardent supporters, those seduced by his staggering backlift and the sheer animal beauty of his strokes, had to confess that it seemed extremely unlikely, and probably impossible, that Lara would again come close to his Antiguan glories of 1994.
This week, with his team facing a whitewash by England — an event that could have triggered the splintering of the once-illustrious but now wretched cricket federation — and with a hundred runs in six previous innings, world records seemed an embarrassingly unlikely proposition. At 34, with his shirt straining to hide the first bulges of early middle-age, Lara was looking at the end of his captaincy, if not his career.
Perhaps it was those pressures that flogged him past 100, and then bullied him past 200. Certainly his determination made him look his age.
But as he entered the strange country of his youth a remarkable change came over him.
Every boundary seemed to erase a year of backbiting, political infighting, batting failures. When he passed 350 he was laughing, and when he raced past 380 and took back his record from Matthew Hayden we got a glimpse of what real triumph feels like to those few who experience it.
It wasn’t happiness or adrenalin that made him smile and scamper singles like a teenager. It was joy. And it made the match circumstances, the impending declaration, the series, seem like dusty footnotes.
Lara has scored better hundreds than the four he strung together on the weekend. His 153 not out to beat Australia in Barbados, where the next highest West Indian score was 38. His 213, two Tests before. Perhaps, if circumstances are taken into account, this week’s must rank as one of his best, and certainly the most emphatic rebuttal in the game’s history.
But he has never looked so happy, and it made one a little sad that he should have had to wait so long.
Sachin Tendulkar needs to score a very big one very soon. Until he does, the Prince stands alone as the greatest batsman of his generation.