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Cricket Players'My bag came flying out of dressing room. Spent first 5 days in bathroom': Lara's first meeting with Vivian Richards
Brian Lara narrated his first meeting with Vivian Richards as a young cricketer.
Brian Lara’s journey in West Indies cricket began with a rather unexpected welcome, or the lack of it: not by an opponent, but by a legend from his own dressing room. Recalling the early days of his Test career on the Stick to Cricket podcast, Lara opened up about his unforgettable first encounter with Sir Vivian Richards.
However, the moment was not what most young cricketers dream of.
“I got an opportunity to play with him (Richards). My first Test match was in Trinidad and I got the letter from the board: ‘You’re on the team. Report 9 AM tomorrow morning for practice,’” Lara said.
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“And I got there at 8 AM, start a little practice in the Queen’s Park Oval with my brother and then the team arrived. And this is all my heroes, Viv (Richards), (Gordon) Greenidge, (Desmond) Haynes, Malcolm Marshall, everybody, all the big boys, and they went into the dressing room.”
What followed was a brutal initiation.
“I said to my brother, ‘It’s time I go say hello to my teammates.’ And while I was walking to the dressing room, my cricket bag came flying out the dressing room, spat everything, just all over the place. I picked it up, packed it back and walked back into the dressing room. And where I placed my bag is where Sir Vivian places his bag. So I spent the first 5 days of my Test career in the bathroom,” Lara added, laughing at the memory.
The former West Indies captain also spoke about how deep cricket ran in his family growing up in Trinidad. He remembered how he and his brothers would secretly stay up at night just to listen to the West Indies’ matches on the radio during their tours of Australia.
“You’ve good experience with him. It’s great, you know, in 75/76 when they were playing in Australia. As a little kid, (a) small house, three bedrooms and cricket started maybe at 8 PM in Trinidad. The Australian time (was) 6, about 15 hours ahead of Trinidad,” Lara said.
“And I could hear my dad’s radio in the room. We had school the next day, so he allowed us to listen to the first session, and then we had to go to bed and his bedroom is just at the top, and we can hear his radio, but we had ours on. So when his door cracked, you know, we would all go to a little bit of a snore.”
Lara called for emergency meeting
Earlier this week, Lara was one of the Windies greats – alongside Richards and Clive Lloyd – to be approached for an emergency meeting by the West Indies cricket board following a humiliating collapse against Australia in the third Test. The side was bowled out for just 27 in the second innings of the Test, recording the second-lowest score in Test history.
