FOUR years ago in 1994, West Indies star batsman Brian Lara was monarch of all he surveyed. But a survey of the sporting press in 1998 would reveal a sharp drop in the popularity rating of the double world record holder newly promoted to the West Indies and Warwickshire captaincy.
Against that background, it is easy to forget how successful Lara has been in his short stint at the helm of the regional team. It is perhaps still too early to talk about a ``legacy''. But it is the word that offers itself to me.
Lloyd's legacy was the four-pronged pace attack. His concentration on fast bowling at all costs made the West Indies, between 1976 and 1985 and beyond, the most powerful force in the history of the game. Lloyd has since been hailed as one of the greatest men to captain the West Indies cricket team, building on what another great, Frank Worrell, started.
Now, three decades after Lloyd, Lara has the reins in his hands.
Expectations ran high even before his first encounter with England this year. Now that he has wowed us all during that series, expectations have been raised even higher.
And some are starting to dream ...
What will Lara leave West Indies cricket when his tenure as captain finally ends? A side of burly batsmen, and a bowling cocktail, including one, probably two, non-negotiable spinners?
West Indians around the world are welcoming the new-look regional cricket team. Our confidence in the opening partnership has returned with the new pair, Clayton Lambert and Philo Wallace-well worth their combined 400-pound weight in runs!
It is a real turnaround from the 1970s: it is now the batsmen who instill fear in the opposition, and the bowlers who wear them down.
Prof Aggrey Brown, a well-known cricket thinker at the University of the West Indies's Mona campus has thought about the issue. Referring to the pair of hard-hitting openers' combined scores of close to 400 in two Tests, ``Gone are the days of grafting an innings,'' he says, ``it's no longer 'the runs will come'. We put them on the defensive from the start.''
According to the director of UWI's Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (Carimac) where he is due to lecture in a new ground-breaking course, Sport and Media, starting next academic year, Lara's new tactics are ``changing the tradition of cricket, revolutionising the way Test cricket will be played''.
To have openers playing Test cricket like if it were One-Day cricket, he says, seems part of a plan that the West Indies happened upon out of necessity. But now that it has worked, it seems set to continue.
There is obviously, says Brown, something going on. After the huge openers, there is the emotion-stirring bundle: the world's most talented batsman at number three; the most loved West Indies cricketer ever, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, next and then vice-captain Carl Hooper.
Then the assortment of bulk and breadth continues: Philip Simmons, Ridley Jacobs or Junior Murray. Even the new boy from Nevis, Carl Tuckett, seems capable of murdering the ball.
And age doesn't matter; young or old, Lara wants them on his side.
Trinidadians knows their skipper's habits only too well. They are well aware of his ability to lead a team to victory on the field. Since 1994, when he became captain for the second time, Trinidad and Tobago has seen victory after victory and been a team to contend with in the regional competitions although, interestingly, they've never quite managed to win the four-day tournament under Lara.
Still, for many, the ``Prince of Port of Spain'' can do no wrong.
Says one die-hard supporter: ``When he do something I don't agree with, I does just wait to see if it go work. Plenty times it does work.''
At least one columnist here in Jamaica has been won over by Lara's hunger for the captaincy. When last did the West Indies have a man so anxious for the job, so intent on doing well? he asked. That killer instinct is the stuff of success, it's what the West Indies need.
It was, it seems clear, honed over many years of experience at the helm of several teams. His first taste of the national captaincy came at age 18, when he led the Trinidad and Tobago Under-19 team. Successful there, he was named captain for the West Indies youth team to tour Australia for the first World Cup Youth in 1988. He was soon leading the West Indies Under-23s against the touring Pakistanis and captaining a winning B-side to Zimbabwe in 1989.
At age 20, he was first appointed to lead the national senior side. But the 1990 Red Stripe Cup was not one of his best seasons and he had to wait until 1994 to get a second shot at the captaincy. That same year, he was made vice-captain of the West Indies against England in the Caribbean. It would be four more years before England returned to the Caribbean to find Lara now installed as captain.
One thing Lara learned from ten years of captaining various sides is how to use a spin attack and pace has never been a major component in any of his teams. So it was no surprise when he opted for leg-spinner Dinanath Ramnarine and left-armer Neil McGarrell, and increased the team's reliance on Hooper's off-breaks and Simmons' less genuine tweakers.
In the event, the One-day side, which operated mostly without Walsh and Ambrose, claimed 24 wickets with spin as against 14 with pace.
For T&T, Lara has often relied on the spin of Rajindra Dhanraj and Ramnarine and he has also successfully opened the bowling with one of these two.
``Dhanraj won all my matches for me,'' Lara once said. And Dhanraj has always credited Lara with increasing his self-confidence by setting the perfect field for him. Arguably, the Barrackpore spinner's West Indies career would have been longer had the current captain been at the helm when he was on the team instead of Richie Richardson or his successor.
So will the West Indies team for South Africa have a few surprises?
Lara will probably lean more comfortably on spin, while still employing the traditional talents of Nixon McLean and Mervyn Dillon. But if you are slim and young, your chances for a batting spot seem to be limited if your style is not aggressive.
Of course, South Africa are playing England in England this summer and Lara, currently captaining Warwickshire in that country, will have a first-hand view of the proceedings-or can if he manages to increase the level of cricketing achievement on his own team. At any rate, he will have two opportunities to play against the Africans for Warwickshire next week Wednesday 10 or on August 12, if he is picked for the First Class Counties Select XI.
Lara knows that the first real test for him comes when they meet South Africa-England, say his critics, are not ``quality opposition''. But applause is due for the new selection policies and new options that the new captain has brought to the region's game.
We are seeing the captaincy redesigned at the hands of the genius. We have no more Holding-Croft-Roberts-Garner-Marshall combination; no more Haynes-and-Greenidge; and Walsh and Ambrose are leaving us. We have no more pace attack; we are no longer ``the best thing on the pitch anywhere in the world''.
But the Warwickshire aberration notwithstanding, hope for West Indies cricket is back: now we have Lara.