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. In January 1988, Lara made his first-class debut for Trinidad and Tobago in the Red Stripe Cup against Leeward Islands. He captained the tournament-winning Trinidad and Tobago, who profited from a match-winning 116 from Lara. 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.Ĭricket career Early first-class career ġ987 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. 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 national under-16 team. 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. He then went to San Juan Secondary School, which is located on Moreau Road, Lower Santa Cruz. As a result, Lara had a very early education in correct batting technique. 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. 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).
īrian Lara is popularly nicknamed as "The Prince of Port of Spain" or simply "The Prince". In 2013, Lara received Honorary Life Membership of the MCC becoming the 31st West Indian to receive the honor. On 14 September 2012 he was inducted to the ICC's Hall of Fame at the awards ceremony held in Colombo, Sri Lanka as a 2012–13 season inductee along with Australians Glenn McGrath and former England women all-rounder Enid Bakewell. īrian Lara was appointed honorary member of the Order of Australia on 27 November 2009.
Lara was awarded the Wisden Leading Cricketer in the World awards in 19 and is also one of only three cricketers to receive the prestigious BBC Overseas Sports Personality of the Year, the other two being Sir Garfield Sobers and Shane Warne. Muttiah Muralitharan, rated as the greatest Test match bowler ever by Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, and the highest wicket-taker in both Test cricket and in One Day Internationals (ODIs), has hailed Lara as his toughest opponent among all batsmen in the world. Lara's match-winning performance of 153 not out against Australia in Bridgetown, Barbados in 1999 has been rated by Wisden as 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. Lara also shares the record of scoring the highest number of runs in a single over in a Test match when he scored 28 runs off an over by Robin Peterson of South Africa in 2003 (matched in 2013 by Australia's George Bailey and in 2020 by South Africa's Keshav Maharaj). Lara also holds the record for the highest individual score in a Test innings after scoring 400 not out against England at Antigua in 2004. 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.
Brian Charles Lara, TC, OCC, AM (born ) is a Trinidadian former international cricketer, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest batsmen of all time.