Waugh: Brian Lara endlessly fascinating

Steve Waugh and Brian Lara : No lingering animosity despite showdowns on the field © Getty Images

No one has yet claimed to have been able to accurately assess the character of the contemporary game's most celebrated, complex and controversial cricketer. And the opponent who has played against him most has been similarly perplexed by the many sides of Brian Lara.

"He is charming, vulnerable, endearing, moody and impossible to work out at times and endlessly fascinating," is the way Steve Waugh, the former Australian captain, describes him in his weighty autobiography, Out of My Comfort Zone. Waugh says he always got on well with Lara, from the time the richly-gifted Trinidadian was the young twelfth man throughout Australia's 1991 Test series in the Caribbean to their most recent tour in 2003 when, according to Waugh, Lara, then his opposing captain, "felt ostracised by the fans".

Even after a face-to-face confrontation on the field during the last Test in Antigua in 2003, Waugh notes that there was no lingering animosity between them. "By the time a smooth Cockspur and Coke slid down our parched throats, Brian and I were hugging each other, exchanging shirts and telling each other how good we were."

Waugh was in opposition for all of Lara's eight hundreds in his 28 Tests against Australia. Among them were two of his finest, his first, 277, at the Sydney Cricket Ground in the 1992-93 series and his unbeaten 153 at Kensington Oval in Barbados that led the West Indies to a one-wicket victory in the 1999 series, described by Waugh as "one of the all-time great matches". "Lara is a good player against average bowling sides and a great one against formidable attacks but when harassed into a corner by his own brinksmanship or if he's targeted, he elevates himself into a genius."

Citing more than one instance, he adds: "Often he would initiate a conversation by being assertive and confrontational to give himself a cause. I sometimes did the same thing." Waugh's 800-page, 400,000-word tome, all authored by himself without the help of a 'ghost' writer and attracting an advance fee of Aus$1.1 million (US$730,000) from publishers Penguin, covers an international career that lasted from 1985 to 2003 in which he played 168 Tests, 57 as captain, and 325 One-day Internationals. His 10,927 runs make him second to fellow Australian Allan Border's 11,174 as Test cricket's highest scorer, but only 68 ahead of Lara.

Waugh holds Malcolm Marshall and Curtly Ambrose above all other fast bowlers in his experience against the West Indies. Writing about his dismissal for four by Marshall in the 1988-89 Test in Brisbane, he states, "I was mesmerised by his explosive run-up, his systematic and beautifully balanced front-on action and his speedy arm and, in all honesty, I don't even think I watched the ball for the man was too impressive to ignore. He was a martial-arts work in full flow with a wrist that could eliminate you in one swipe."

Waugh had more than one memorable confrontation with Ambrose, most notably the eyeball-to-eyeball clash in the Queen's Park Oval Test of 1999 that the Australian describes in detail. But Waugh is unstinting in his admiration for the tall Antiguan. "To me, Curtly Ambrose was the supreme fast bowling machine. He moved with the ease and grace of a champion athlete across the ground, was beautifully balanced and coordinated and could blast you out with pace if needed or revert to a strategic assault. He possessed that trait everyone wants but few possess: the gift of being able to shift into that extra gear when necessary. The icing on the cake for Ambi was his imposing physical presence - legs like stilts, arms that never seemed to end and pouting lips that looked like they'd been stung by a swarm of bees."

Yet it is another West Indian fast bowler, the late Sylvester Clarke, who Waugh states bowled "the most awkward and nastiest spell I ever encountered" in an English county cricket match for Somerset against Surrey at The Oval. "Pace and bounce of the kind Clarke could muster is something you can't prepare for," he recalls. "It's an assault both physically and mentally and the moment you weaken and think about what might happen, you're either out or injured. I think this was the first time I experienced a genuine awareness that if I didn't concentrate there would be serious implications".