Lara, best leftie of all time?

The advent and enormous popularity of social media has enabled not only the rapid spread of information, but facilitated global surveys and popularity contests. These are being employed increasingly in the field of sport to make comparisons between the sporting ‘greats’ of different eras, pitting today’s heroes against their illustrious predecessors.{more}}

A whole series of these virtual contests has arisen, asking social media users to vote for “the greatest” athletes of all time in a range of sports. Not surprisingly, the athletes of recent vintage tend to come out on top, since most social media users would be of the younger generation and save for statistics and an odd glimpse from past documentaries, be familiar only with those of their generation and those directly preceding them.

The cricketing website, Cricinfo, the most popular in its field, has been running a number of these polls recently. One of these would have caught the eyes of Caribbean cricket fans, since it is entitled “Who is the best left-hand batsman in Tests?” In a region which has produced two left-handed legends, in the persons of Sir Garfield Sobers and Brian Lara, such a question is bound to stimulate great interest.

Cricinfo readers were asked to choose from among five great left-handed batsmen over the ages: the two Caribbean superstars mentioned, plus Australia’s Allan Border, Graeme Smith of South Africa and Sri Lanka’s giant, Kumar Sangakkara, who is about to retire from the sport at international level. Strangely, the man considered in many quarters to be South’s Africa’s greatest batsman, the left-hander Graeme Pollock, a contemporary of Sobers and highly rated in the great man’s category, was excluded. It may be that, due to apartheid, he played only 23 tests, but his average at 60.97, is second only to that of the unmatched Sir Don Bradman, and he passed 50 in almost half of his 41 innings, (seven hundreds and 11 fifties).

The results of the poll rated Lara as the greatest left-hander, a conclusion that will be contested by those who saw or heard of Sobers in action. Lara’s star quality is beyond question. He it is who broke Sobers’ record score of 365 not out, after almost four decades, and became the first man to reclaim the highest Test score after the Australian Mathew Hayden had broken his 375. His 400 on that occasion made him the only batsman to have scored a triple, quadruple and quintuple-century in first-class cricket.

However supporters of Sobers will say that his value went far beyond statistics, pointing to his herculean efforts with the bat. He scored his 365 at the age of 21, it being his first three-figure score in Tests, held it for 37 years until Lara broke it. They will also claim that it would be difficult to imagine any bowler giving Sobers the sort of trouble Lara experienced at the hands of the Australian Glen McGrath. Lara’s supporters will counter that Sobers had the likes of Hunte, Kanhai, Nurse and Butcher to provide support. Lara had no such back-up, being the Atlas of West Indies’ batting.

The arguments will go on forever. For Caribbean people, is it not enough that undoubtedly we have produced the two top ‘lefties’ and two of the best of all time?

(Contributed)