Every superb Brian Lara innings that ends in defeat reminds one that cricket is a team sport and only very rarely can individuals affect the result of a game.
The West Indies captain's form in recent games has been nothing short of exceptional. In recent months, cricket's connoisseurs have been spell-bound and glued to their seats in anticipation of a big score from the Trinidadian every time he walks out to bat. His stroke-play, exquisitely brutal, has an unknown addictive quality to it. Watch it once and you are entranced. But even his overbearing genius has been unable to lead his side to victories consistently.
Why?
Because his mind is weighed down by the past.
A past that was glorious; one that now needs to be confined to the annals of cricket history. It has no place in the present.
Simply because, at this moment, no matter what this current crop of West Indian cricketers do, and no matter how well they do it, they are always being compared to the great West Indies teams of the early eighties.
In fact, the situation holds true for almost any team in world cricket; any team with a sense of history. Cricket, by all means, lives in the past.
Indian teams, for example, will always have the ghost of the 1983 World Cup-winning squad haunt them. The present team reached the final of the recent World Cup, but people are still saying, "The 1983 team won the World Cup."
Give the guys a break; they play their best cricket and all they get is, "You could have done better."
The all-conquering Australians are not spared either. The late Don Bradman's 1948 Australian team, nicknamed 'The Invincibles', features in almost every conversation about the best team in history. Nothing wrong with that. But what the current team has achieved is remarkable in its own right.
During the 2003 World Cup in South Africa, I met Rameez Raja, now the PCB Chief Executive. He was talking about Pakistan's triumph in the 1992 World Cup and the talk invariably shifted towards legendary Pakistan captain Imran Khan.
"When Imran was captain," he said, "we did not know who the selectors were." Is that a situation that he, as the PCB chief, would relish? I suppose not. But that is the power and the mystique of the past. It makes everything seem so surreal and nice, almost perfect.
And because sports and the past are entwined in an inevitable manner, at times, we tend to give the latter more importance than it deserves. We use records as yardsticks and forget that they were set in a different era, with different parameters.
At the moment, we have England and Pakistan; Sri Lanka and the West Indies locking horns. All four sides have many new faces hoping to make a mark for themselves. Surely, the achievements of their predecessors will weigh them down. Uneccessary criticism will only stiffle them and prevent them from showing their true colours.
What one is trying to drive at is that the current crop of players should be assessed for what they are and not against the backdrop of the past. But it's time we forget what had happened and get going with the present, and the present alone.
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