That is the question still being asked today as Lara prepares to bid West Indies and world cricket goodbye at Kensington Oval in the final Super Eights match of this
ICC Cricket World Cup. For his part, West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) president Ken Gordon says he wanted Lara to stay on for one more tour.
For his part, West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) president Ken Gordon says he wanted Lara to stay on for one more tour.
"If you ask me personally, I would have liked to have seen him perhaps stay on for the English tour," Gordon told the Express yesterday.
"But you have to take other people's views into account and clearly his mind was running in a different direction."
However, it is understood that the West Indies selectors (Gordon Greenidge, Andy Roberts and Clyde Butts), who reportedly met with the WICB boss last week in Grenada, were of a different view and were not considering Lara for the Test and one-day tour of England next month.
Asked about this, the WICB president said: "I have had no formal proposal (from the selectors) but we have been in informal discussions."
He declined, however, to reveal the nature of those discussions.
"I couldn't possibly think of answering that," he said. "I'm prepared to be open with you, but there are limits within which I cannot go."
Instead, Gordon who played an influential role in Lara's return to the captaincy a year ago, painted a different picture.
He said that prior to Thursday afternoon, Lara's decision to retire had not been expected.
"If you had asked me that at the beginning of the match yesterday, I would have said yes, it had come as a surprise," he said.
"But by the time the seventh or eighth wicket had fallen, I got a message that he wanted to see me when the team came off and would I come to meet him.
"I sensed that something was coming. And from that point onward there was no longer the surprise element. Because I knew something would be happening for him to ask me to see him at such short notice and with such urgency."
Told of Lara's decision to retire, Gordon didn't try to change the mind of the champion batsman because he didn't think it was appropriate to do that.
Note:
Trinidad Express [9]