Caribbean legend lives through Lara
Before ICC Trophy, Lara said it was just bad luck that he was captain when WI were going through troubled times, writes Kadambari Murali.
Legends need to be lucky too. Before the Champions Trophy began, Brian Lara unequivocally stated that it was just coincidence and his bad luck that he happened to be captain of the West Indies when they were going through a time of trial and turbulence.
He hit out at the way cricket was run in the Caribbean, talked about internal battles within the higher echelons of Caribbean cricket, pointed out to the paucity of funds for the development of the game and decried the decreasing importance of the game in the islands.
Lara was not preparing ground for another pathetic performance from the world's first one-day superpower — he was merely stating the facts as they were. In the way only Lara possibly could. In a no-holds-barred manner, bare and shorn of pretension.
And then he added that the thing that kept him going were his team-mates. He would later say, on the eve of the Champions Trophy final against England, that any captain is only as good as his team and therein lay his greatest strength.
