Hometown revel in latest batting exploit

CANTARO: As West Indies captain Brian Lara smashed his way to a second world record in Test cricket yesterday,  wild cheers erupted in the tiny barroom around the corner from his childhood home in Trinidad. Watching the television set on the wall at Valley Bar, the men hoisted bottles of Carib beer and glasses of rum, hugged each other and held a portrait of Lara in the air. “Lara is the greatest-ever batsman that ever passed through Trinidad, and possibly the greatest-ever to pass through the world,” contract labourer Winston Regis, 52, said just after Lara reached 384 not out to reclaim the highest score in Test history. Lara went on to 400 before his team declared their second innings at a mammoth 751 for five wickets in the Fourth Test against England.

But for Cantaro, Lara’s second-time record was a victory for the village of 2,500 just northeast of Trinidad’s capital where Lara played cricket on the streets with bats made from coconut tree branches. The agricultural village has since named a playing field after Lara, with a picture of him batting mounted on the sign. Just about everyone can tell you how to find the modest brick-and-cement house where he grew up as the son of a government agriculture officer and a housewife, both of whom have died.

In the yard yesterday, family members and friends set up a TV and stocked bar for the neighbourhood to watch Lara’s performance. They said they never doubted their hometown hero would reclaim the record after losing it in October to Australian Matthew Hayden, who set the standard with 380 against Zimbabwe in Perth. “Brian always had an appetite for big things,” said one of his six brothers, Winston Lara, 51. Cars driving along Cantaro’s dusty streets blew their horns and blared local soca music in celebration.

Villagers remembered Lara as intensely competitive, even as a young cricketer. “When Lara was a young boy, he used to cry because he was out,” private contractor Roger Carimbocas, 42, said. Though he now lives in a palatial house on a hill in Trinidad’s capital, where he is routinely called the “Prince of Port-of-Spain,” Lara still visits Cantaro frequently, stopping for a beer at the Valley Bar and spending time with family, locals said. “The man was a perfect cricketer from when he was a baby,” said car mechanic Freddie Gordon, 52. (AP)