Lara adds graft to true genius

"You know, here we think he'll go after Viv Richards' world record of 1,700 Test runs in a calendar year," Keith Clement, assistant sports editor at the Trinidad Guardian, told me - too polite to mention eight of those Tests are against England, home and away.

Lara's homeland, he said, had never stopped believing that anything is possible with this man but the island also now recognised a new serenity in its icon.

"You see a different Lara now: more positive, more focused, someone who's matured over two or three years. He was laid-back and seemed to take things so easy but now he's showing more responsibility, particularly as the leader of his team," he explained.

Whereas in the old days when he was on the island, stories would seep out about Brian, booze and birds, now the sightings of Lara in Trinidad are different. "When he's home now, he's only to be found in the nets working on his game, or perhaps having a run on the savannah," said Clement.

Lara's commitment to dragging the West Indies back to cricket's top table has now become his last major incentive, even above any individual targets such as Matthew Hayden's 380. His eyes are set on the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean, possibly as the perfect farewell stage at 37.

Inter-island rivalries still mean he copped a bit of criticism in Trinidad recently for representing a Barbadian club side, yet he defended his decision by saying it was all about finding the right competition to get sharp for bigger challenges.

"Before he left for South Africa he told me that, in cricket, 'I'm a West Indian first, then a Trinidadian'," explained Clement.

Lara himself has talked candidly about his mistakes of old when the suffocating nature of his fame following his 1994 heroics made his life unbearable and him, well, unbearable too. With hindsight it looks a simple case of too much, too young.

"I often reacted to what I perceivedto be the stresses of cricket by getting away from it and hanging out with friends. Instead of confronting problems, I would turn my back on them," he noted last summer. "Now I've realised I want to give cricket 100 per cent."

This new attitude was just half of the equation. The other was the correction of a technical problem in his batting at the end of 2001 thanks to a Gary Sobers observation that his backlift was flawed, making him chop across the line of the ball. Lara worked on this in Jamaica before going to Sri Lanka and immediately compiling his first hundred in 16 Test innings.

He has not looked back since. Even in what is looking a golden age for batting, from Tendulkar to Hayden, his still appears the most resplendent."There had been times when I asked myself, 'Do I need all this?', but I'm back in love with cricket," trumpeted Lara recently. Cricket is back in love with him, too, and should England be truly flayed, somehow it will soften the blow if the Sun King is responsible.