And he did it with such a born-to-rule attitude that you grew to hate the sight of him. My memories of Lara are mainly of frustration, of games that my beloved Australia would have won easily were it not for this contemptuous aristocrat standing in the way, plundering great and average bowlers alike.

To see the same man demonstrate that, in fact, he fits into those boots perfectly is utterly unbearable. To see a man who is too big for his boots is anathema for many an Aussie fan.

'They are going to provide serious cricket, and therefore we have put them in serious stadia.How could I not hate Brian Lara? He was exactly the kind of cocky, flashy show-off that Australians are trained from birth to despise: especially if the show-off is not Australian and doubly so if the show-off happens to be very, very good. 'When the ICC (International Cricket Council) changed that to have England playing Australia for example in a warm-up match, we looked at these as serious games because no team will want to go into these and lose their momentum. 'The 2007 World Cup will mark the first time where teams will actually play each other in the warm-up stage,вЂ™ Lockerbie added. Previous World Cups have seen countries gearing up for the competition by playing local first class sides, but this has now changed with the undoubted pick of Trinidad & Tobago's designated warm-up fixtures being South Africa's clash with Pakistan on 9 March. Those three stadia and the other eight being renovated or built for the tournament remain on schedule for completion ahead of the event, Lockerbie insisted. The three other venues for the warm-up games will be the 3Ws Oval in Barbados, Trelawny Stadium in Jamaica and the Arnos Vale Stadium in St Vincent. People will be getting a world-class state-of-the-art venue, even in its temporary mode.' The government of Trinidad & Tobago will still play its warm-up matches in a sizeable stadium that will be customised just for the World Cup. 'We will name the site we are moving to on Monday. We just felt it would be too much of a construction zone because of the other things being built there. 'It wasn't a matter of not having some kind of a stadium there, in fact the pitch and field are ready to go and we could certainly put the grandstands around it. 'We stood by it as long as we could, but we made the decision that we didn't feel it would be right for the Brian Lara Stadium to be a host. After Brian Lara scored his 400 runs against England in 2004 they decided to build a cricket stadium in his honour. 'The government of Trinidad & Tobago took a risk that they were willing to take and we were willing to take with them. The Cricket World Cup's venue development director Don Lockerbie told PA: 'The Brian Lara Stadium is our casualty and obviously we would have liked to go through the whole of the World Cup without any casualties.' The ground had been due to host warm-up matches involving Ireland, Pakistan, South Africa and Canada. Cricket World Cup officials will announce on Monday the replacement for the Brian Lara Stadium, which was last month dropped from the list of venues for the tournament.Д¬onstruction work at the 15,000-capacity stadium, in southern Trinidad, will not be completed before the start of the event in March.

Brian lara cricket ground