The summer of 1994 was an important page in the history of international cricket. Very few players have managed to do what Brian Lara did. The West Indies great feasted on the English bowlers to send the record keepers of the game gasping for breath.
Lara became the first batsman to score a 100, 200, 300, and a 500.
The 400, a missing piece in the record puzzle also made its way into his glittering collection but he had to wait for another decade. No record was safe as long as the stylish southpaw was at the crease.
In April 1994, Lara broke fellow West Indian Sir Garry Sobers’s record for the highest individual score in Test cricket. After moving to England for the county season, the onslaught continued. He had six centuries in seven first-class matches for Warwickshire at the time. The law of averages had to catch up with Lara, right? Even he thought so.
“I was dropped on 18 and dismissed off a no-ball. I went up to my batting partner and said ‘this has been a good run but this is not my day. It had to come to an end,’” Lara said in a podcast recently.
Interestingly, Lara wasn’t even supposed to be a part of the English domestic summer. India all-rounder Manoj Prabhakar was Warwickshire’s first-choice pick but ended up suffering an injury just before the start of the season and Lara was drafted in as a last-minute replacement.
There were opportunities that Durham spurned early into Lara’s innings on a dead wicket in Birmingham. Anderson Cummins had bowled him with a yorker, only for it to be chalked off for a no-ball when Lara was on 12 but the costlier one was wicketkeeper Chris Scott putting down a simple chance when he was on 18.
Durham, who had a handsome lead, wilted with key players David Graveney and Mark Saxelby suffering injuries, and Lara had completed his century by day four.
Batting at 111 at the start of the day’s play in a rain-affected game that was crawling towards a draw, getting to 500 seemed like a feat that was possible only in the famous video game from the 1990s that Lara was the face of. Scoring almost 400 in a day was impossible even for a player of the Trinidadian’s class... or was it?
Watch: Brian Lara’s first Test century, an epic knock of 277 against the Aussies in their own den
Lara threw caution to the wind in trademark fashion and plundered 174 runs before lunch alone. The Guardian reported that Warwickshire captain, all-rounder Dermot Reeve, had considered declaring, only to be coaxed by coach Bob Woolmer to allow the Lara show to continue. Lara and Reeve were famously not seeing eye to eye at the time.
In a bizarre coincidence, Woolmer was also present in Karachi when Pakistan legend Hanif Mohammad scored 499 in 1958-’59, the highest first-class score at the time.
Lara found able partners in Trevor Penney and Keith Piper, who scored 116. The boundaries continued to come at a rapid pace and even his monumental effort in Antigua earlier that year was left far behind. It was not long before Lara went past 400 as well but was a tad conservative after Tea. Despite sending the Durham bowlers for a leather hunt like never before, Lara was reportedly seen taking throwdowns during the break. Such was his hunger for runs.
With a draw on the cards, the umpires were ready to draw stumps half an hour before regulation time, effectively making John Morris’s over the final one of the match. Lara was batting on 497 at this point.
Lara played out three dot balls and a nasty beamer from Morris in the fourth meant that the former had only two more swipes at history. The fifth ball of the over was short and wide and Lara came up with another gorgeous cut shot to go where no man has.
It was his 62nd boundary that went with his ten sixes and had amassed 390 runs in a day, an all-time record. In a day and age where schoolboy prodigies and their feats go viral on the internet every third day, Lara cemented his place in history as one of the greatest to walk on the field with a bat in his hand, and a record that may not be broken for many years to come.
Watch highlights of Brian Lara’s 501 here: