Brian Lara

Brian Charles Lara, (born 2 May 1969) is a Trinidadian former international cricketer, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest batsmen of all time.

1987 was a breakthrough year for Lara, when in the West Indies Youth Championships he scored 498 runs breaking the record of 480 by Carl Hooper set the previous year.

He captained the tournament-winning Trinidad and Tobago, who profited from a match-winning 116 from Lara.

In January 1988, Lara made his first-class debut for Trinidad and Tobago in the Red Stripe Cup against Leeward Islands.

In his second first-class match he made 92 against a Barbados attack containing Joel Garner and Malcolm Marshall, two greats of West Indies teams.

Later in the same year, he captained the West Indies team in Australia for the Bicentennial Youth World Cup where the West Indies reached the semi-finals.

Later that year, his innings of 182 as captain of the West Indies Under-23s against the touring Indian team further elevated his reputation.

His first selection for the full West Indies team followed in due course, but unfortunately coincided with the death of his father and Lara withdrew from the team.

In 1989, he captained a West Indies B Team in Zimbabwe and scored 145.

In 1990, at the age of 20, Lara became Trinidad and Tobago's youngest-ever captain, leading them that season to victory in the one-day Geddes Grant Shield.

It was also in 1990 that he made his belated Test debut for West Indies against Pakistan, scoring 44 and 5.

He had made his ODI debut a month earlier against Pakistan, scoring 11.

In January 1993, Lara scored 277 versus Australia in Sydney.

This, his maiden Test century in his fifth Test, was the turning point of the series as West Indies won the final two Tests to win the series 2–1.

Lara went on to name his daughter Sydney after scoring 277 at SCG.

Lara holds several world records for high scoring.

He topped the Test batting rankings on several occasions and holds several cricketing records, including the record for the highest individual score in first-class cricket, with 501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham at Edgbaston in 1994, which is the only quintuple-hundred in first-class cricket history.

Lara was awarded the Wisden Leading Cricketer in the World awards in 1994 and 1995 and is also one of only three cricketers to receive the BBC Overseas Sports Personality of the Year, the other two being Sir Garfield Sobers and Shane Warne.

He has the highest individual score in both first-class cricket (501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham in 1994) and Test cricket (400 not out for the West Indies against England in 2004).

Lara amassed his world record 501 in 474 minutes off only 427 balls.

He hit 308 in boundaries (10 sixes and 62 fours).

Lara's match-winning performance of 153 not out against Australia in Bridgetown, Barbados in 1999 was rated by Wisden the second-best batting performance in the history of Test cricket, next only to the 270 runs scored by Sir Donald Bradman in The Ashes Test match of 1937.

Muttiah Muralitharan has hailed Lara as his toughest opponent among all batsmen in the world.

Lara also held, for 18 years, the record of scoring the highest number of runs in a single over of a Test match when he scored 28 runs off an over by Robin Peterson of South Africa in 2003 (overtaken by Jasprit Bumrah in 2022).

As captain, Lara led the West Indies team to win the 2004 ICC Champions Trophy, the first time the team won any major ICC trophy since winning the 1979 Cricket World Cup.

Lara also holds the record for the highest individual score in a Test innings after scoring 400 not out at Antigua during the 4th test against England in 2004.

He is the only batsman in the history of international test cricket to have scored 400+ runs in an innings.

Brian Lara was appointed honorary member of the Order of Australia on 27 November 2009.

In September 2012 he was inducted to the ICC's Hall of Fame as a 2012–13 season inductee.

In 2013, Lara received Honorary Life Membership of the MCC becoming the 31st West Indian to receive the honor.

Brian Lara is popularly nicknamed as "The Prince of Port of Spain" or simply "The Prince".

He has the dubious distinction of playing in the second-highest number of test matches (63) in which his team was on the losing side, just behind Shivnarine Chanderpaul (68).

Brian is one of eleven siblings.

His father Bunty and one of his older sisters Agnes Cyrus enrolled him in the local Harvard Coaching Clinic at the age of six for weekly coaching sessions on Sundays.

As a result, Lara had a very early education in correct batting technique.

Lara's first school was St. Joseph's Roman Catholic primary.

He then went to San Juan Secondary School, which is located on Moreau Road, Lower Santa Cruz.

A year later, at fourteen years old, he moved on to Fatima College where he started his development as a promising young player under cricket coach Harry Ramdass.

Aged 14, he amassed 745 runs in the schoolboys' league, with an average of 126.16 per innings, which earned him selection for the Trinidad and Tobago national under-16 team.

When he was 15 years old, he played in his first West Indian under-19 youth tournament and that same year, Lara represented West Indies in Under-19 cricket.