For that reason I had a third man most of the time as well as at deep gully and at
For that reason I had a third man most of the time as well as at deep gully and at backward cover point. I wanted him to have to get his runs on the leg-side where he is less able to manouevre his shots exactly where he wants.”As an excercise in manipulation the ploy clearly bore fruit. The waggon wheel diagram (above) clearly shows that only two of Lara’s 16 boundaries were scored in the arc behind square cover, both coming off seam bowlers when he was batting at the Warwick Road End. But as a tactical success, it can only be said to have worked from the point of view of damage limitation and the fact that Lara ended some 230 runs light of his last three-figure score against England.”Obviously, with Corky’s hat-trick getting us off to a flyer on Sunday, we started trying to get Lara out, and I set attacking fields,” Atherton said.
“To the spinners in particular, I kept tinkering with various positions to try to force him to do something uncharacteristic and therefore make an error. In fact, a couple of times he was fortunate to clear the man I had posted on the drive to Winker [Mike Watkinson] and Ernie [John Emburey].”But Lara is a player with exquisite gifts, not least the ability to take the ball early or late and still strike it with enough power to exploit the gaps in the field. “Once he’d got to a hundred I was in a pretty helpless situation; he was playing that well. I had no option but to put a sweeper out on both sides of the wicket and try to get him off strike in order to attack the batsman at the other end.”Another of the outstanding features of Lara’s knock was the way he still managed to score freely off the spinners without getting himself into the kind of difficulties left- handers normally encounter when faced with balls turning away from the bat. Although the pitch didn’t offer regular spin, the odd ball turned enough to have persuaded most left-handed batsmen to have stayed rooted to the crease. Not Lara, who used his feet, combining nimble excursions down the pitch to drive with sweeps to leg and neat back-foot dabs to off.He never allowed either Watkinson or Emburey to settle.
As the diagram clearly shows, three sumptuous drives to the extra cover fence and two more through straight mid-wicket against the turn – when Lara was facing spin fvom the Warwick Road End – show just how exacting his footwork must have been in getting to the pitch of the ball, and how crisp his shots were to find the gaps with such precision.The end came when Lara whipped Angus Fraser off his hips, flat as a skeet to deep square leg, where Nick Knight took an awkward catch coming forward. It was the kind of delivery most mortals would have been happy to tuck away for a single. Lara, though, was a victim – not for the first time – of his extravagant talent.England supporters will be in two minds about seeing too much of that talent when the teams meet at Trent Bridge on Thursday.. LAST season, Damon Hill ran Michael Schumacher, universally acclaimed as the best driver in Formula One, to within one point for the World Drivers’ Championship. Cynically removed from the Australian Grand Prix by the German, Hill was a tabloid hero, the brave Brit battling against the odds. Nine months on he has become a man tortured on the rack of his own desire to prove himself once and for all.
Not just to the public and to a media that is beginning to doubt him again, but also to a team that does not appear to be bolstering his confidence. The innocent of Adelaide has, in two foreshortened races, gone from being the prat of Silverstone to the pariah of Hockenheim.
For all his success in the past two-and-a-half seasons – 11 grand prix victories, which is only three fewer than his father, who won the world championship twice – Hill is still haunted by a spectre of doubt and his confidence has been undermined.That uncertainty manifested itself in the most public fashion when he and Schumacher slid on to the gravel during the British Grand Prix and when he spun out alone while leading the German race. But as he sets out for Hungary, where he won his first grand prix two years ago, Hill may wish that his team owner, Frank Williams, recalls the Spanish Grand Prix of 1981.The Australian Alan Jones, who is still an icon to Williams, pushed one of his cars to the front for 13 laps Then he locked up his brakes and spun. He finished a miserable seventh and the race went to Gilles Villeneuve driving a Ferrari as cumbersome as the Williams had been dominant.Jones was not under anything like the sort of pressure Hill faced at Hockenheim, where the crowd was down on him just as factions within his team sometimes appear to be. But Jonesy was forgiven that faux pas because he was one of the boys – a daring, gutsy puncher of a driver who was growing with the team and helped them to periods of dominance. Everyone screws up from time to time, but some drivers are not allowed to forget their mistakes.Hill was plucked from the footlights and thrust into a starring role opposite Alain Prost when Nigel Mansell quit Formula One for IndyCars at the end of 1992. He was the first new boy to graduate in a really competitive car since Jackie Stewart drove for BRM in 1965.
