This one will run and run: Cricketers have been astonished by the Trinidadian's feats but more will come, writes Richard Williams

ONE OF the most familiar aphorisms in sport is that records are made to be broken. It's what Sir Gary Sobers graciously said, standing on the edge of the pitch in Antigua a few weeks ago, just a couple of minutes after Brian Lara had taken his 36-year-old record for the highest individual Test innings. He was wrong. Not in cricket, they aren't. In fact, cricketing records are made to last - to be read about in antiquarian volumes, committed to memory, carefully polished and taken out in company. Most significantly, they are ruthlessly deployed in order to put the attempts of later generations, and particularly the present one, into unfavourable perspective.

Last Tuesday, the entire cricket-conscious world found cause for celebration in Lara's extraordinary double feat of following his 375 for West Indies against England by scoring the highest innings ever recorded in first-class cricket - 501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham in the English county championship, beating Hanif Mohammad's 35-year-old mark by two runs. The leader column of the Guardian was the most lyrical in its acceptance of his feat, and the most euphoric in its seizure of the opportunity to jolt cricket lovers awake. 'You should see Lara,' its leader writer crooned. 'Because he's here, today, now. We can forget the past.'

The idea of cricket fans forgetting the past is so unlikely as to seem surreal. Forget the past? They are formed by it, addicted to it, utterly dependent on the permanently available primrose consolation of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, its lists and tables creating a narcotic bygone world of golden summers and flawless heroes. Now along comes Brian Lara, and suddenly (as Carly Simon once sang) these are the good old days.

Lara, Lara, Lara. In five English county championship matches this season, Brian Charles Lara of Trinidad has batted seven times, scored six centuries, and become a national celebrity. In recent years, the appearance of cricketers in the news pages of the tabloid papers has usually been for reasons other than the accumulation of runs or wickets: canoodling with buxom barmaids, crossing the Alps in the elephant-tracks of Hannibal, going for joyrides in antique biplanes during matches, trying to make it in Hollywood. Brian Lara has done none of the things that enabled the likes of Ian Botham and Vivian Richards to rise so far above the status of mere sportsmen that, when their services were no longer required on winter tours, they were able to take themselves around the theatres as a double-act. All Lara has done, by contrast, is score runs and break statistical records.

Why Lara? He has, as everybody has noted, the eyes of a hawk, the hands of a fencer and a dancer's nimble footwork, aided by a mobile 5ft 5in frame. But why not, say, Graeme Hick, who came to England from Zimbabwe in 1984 with the tag of the new Bradman hanging around his neck? Now, at the age of 28, and despite more than 70 first-class centuries and one innings of 405, Hick has still to establish himself as a real Test batsman. Basic technique is one difference. Hick swings the bat straight and hits the ball hard; at 6ft 3in and 14st 7lb he is the image of the well set-up sportsman. Yet there is something ponderous, something that seems over-tutored and inflexible, in his style. Both he and Lara began to play the game in early childhood - Lara at three, with a home-made bat and a marble; Hick scoring his first century at six - but only the West Indian has retained a sense of joy in his game. Sensitive encouragement and sensible coaching must take some of the credit for that, but it seems clear that Lara knew his destiny almost as soon as he was big enough to pick up a bat. Good judges who watched him as a schoolboy knew that something extraordinary was on the way. Yet the West Indies selectors chose to bring him along gradually, easing him into the international game and thereby helping to ensure that when the 25-year-old Lara faces a battery of cameras and microphones after destroying cricket's most venerable records, he is balanced and articulate and utterly unfazed by the attention.

Other countries now bring on talented young players much more effectively than England. In Australia, a national cricket academy has produced more talented players than the national team can use, leading some of the overspill to seek their fortunes as naturalised Englishmen. Of those who stayed at home, the bleached- blond leg-spinner Shane Warne is, at 24, fit to stand with any slow bowler in history. In India, the great coach Ramakant Achrekar presides each morning and evening over a city-centre park crowded with hundreds of boys, all got up in proper cricket whites and learning the game with willow bats, leather balls, and a proper understanding of the game as Hobbs and Bradman knew it. His proteges include the young Test batsmen Vi nod Kambli and Sachin Tendul kar, who put England to the sword last year.

Tendulkar, now 21, is the player who in style and potential most closely resembles Lara. They share an upbringing in solid families, as well as a similar build and temperament. Both were schoolboy prodigies who somehow never got spoilt. And if you had to bet on someone to break the records Lara has just set, it would be Tendulkar, who will one day succeed to the captaincy of the Indian Test team - just as Lara will almost certainly lead West Indies. Cricket lovers can look forward to the competition over the coming 10 or 15 years as these two modest but attractively self-confident men chase each other all the way through the record books.

Just about the only criticism heard of Lara is that he will not be truly great until he has turned the course of an important match entirely by his own efforts, as Botham did against Australia in 1981. It is harder for Lara simply because West Indies are such a good side that they seldom find themselves in deep trouble. But in Jamaica last February, with his side at 23 for three and facing an England total of 234, it was Lara who began the recovery that won the match and laid the foundations for victory in the series with an innings full of a character that infected and inspired his team-mates.

The question of individual and collective achievement is more complicated in cricket than in other team games. When Rob Andrew raised the total of points scored by a single England player in last week's victory over South Africa, there was applause but little astonishment. Rugby union really is a team game - unlike cricket, which is a game for individuals playing as a team. Football is more like rugby - although one of the most notable records will be put to its quadrennial test in the middle of July, when someone - probably a Brazilian - will fancy his chances of matching Geoff Hurst's 1966 feat of being the only player to score three goals in a World Cup final.

All records attract sceptics, of course, and it was being suggested around the office coffee machine last week that it was a pity Lara had broken the two records so close together. Didn't one detract from the other, in the sense that neither could be celebrated properly? On the contrary: the 501 validates the 375, and vice versa. The existence of both meant that neither was subject to the suspicion of having been accumulated by a batsman in form and in luck against a poor bowling attack on a featherbed wicket with short boundaries, butterfingered fielders and a generous pair of umpires. The true test of a champion is that, having done it once, he or she can go out and do it again. This, then, was the real thing.

And it's still only mid-June. Lara currently has 1,176 runs from seven innings in England. Over the remainder of the season, depending on the weather and his team's fortunes, Lara could take the crease 24 more times, which means that another record, perhaps even more formidable, is in his sights. In 1947, the all-time golden summer, the one that is most probably in the minds of older cricket lovers whenever they get nostalgic, Denis Compton and Bill Edrich of Middlesex each scored more than 3,500 runs in the English season. Compton, the Brylcreem Boy, finished with 3,816 runs in 50 innings, including 18 centuries. Six of them were in home Test matches, which loads the odds against Lara, but even so one would not bet too much money against him turning this into the season of seasons.

(Photograph omitted)