Sunday, March 12, 2006

Casting the first stone

Before the ongoing West Indies-New Zealand Test series, Brian Lara challenged Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the current WI captain, to score more runs as befits a senior player on a team that is struggling to be competitive, let alone win games.

Lara himself stood up to be counted, scoring 5 and 0, while lasting a total of 13 balls and falling victim to Shane Bond both times with a golden duck in the second innings when his team came up short by just 27 runs.

Methinks the title of this Saul Bellow book best describes Lara's verbal faux pas?

1 comment:

BF said...

sacrilegious as it may sound, I think the time has come for Brian Charles Lara to pipe down and play out his cricketing years quietly.

He is most welcome to be a friend and mentor to Shivnarine Chanderpaul off the field - to call him out and put him under pressure through the media is the mark of an absolute cad.

I always thought Lara was made of sterner stuff. Hopefully the other senior citizens around - Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar for one - do not misread this message from Lara and decide that they need to engage in public exhortation too.

Of course, Dravid has for a few years now been the best player on the Indian team so hopefully, Chanderpaul's discomfiture will not apply to Rahul...