West Indies v England 4th Test

A record lost and a series lost

Brian Lara had made 375 against England at this same ground, the Antigua Recreation Ground, in 1994, then the highest score in Test history. That record passed to Matthew Hayden, who made 380 against Zimbabwe in October 2003. West Indies arrived at the fourth Test of the 2004 series against England having already lost the series, beaten in the first three matches, and with nothing left to play for but pride and, as it turned out, history. It was a difficult period for West Indian cricket more broadly, the side no longer the dominant force it had been through the 1980s, and Lara, by then West Indies' captain and carrying much of the batting responsibility alone, won the toss and chose to bat first at a ground where he already held a piece of history.

Lara bats and bats

Daren Ganga and Chris Gayle opened, and Lara came in at three once Ganga was out for 10 with the score on 33. He found Gayle in good touch, the pair adding 65 before Gayle was caught off Gareth Batty for 69, and then found an even better ally in Ramnaresh Sarwan, who made 90 before he was caught off Steve Harmison; their third-wicket partnership added 232 from 349 balls and took the total past 300. Lara himself batted through partner after partner, untroubled by an England attack that included Steve Harmison, Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones, all bowlers with genuine pace. By the end of the first day he had already passed a hundred, and the pattern of the match was set: West Indies would bat, and bat, and bat again. Simon Jones in particular found no reward for his effort, finishing with figures of 1 for 146 from 29 overs by the time the innings was finally done, a bowling workload matched by Harmison's 37 overs at the other end for a single wicket of his own.

Past three hundred

Ricardo Powell added 23 and Ryan Hinds 36 in support, the pair together adding another 139 with Lara across the fourth and fifth wickets, but it was Lara's innings that dominated every session regardless of who was at the other end. He moved through 150, 200 and 250 with the same mixture of correct defence and full-blooded strokeplay that had always characterised his batting at his best, and by the time he passed 300, with Hinds now out and Ridley Jacobs newly arrived at the crease, the whole ground understood it was watching an assault on the world record he had lost seven months earlier.

Jacobs stays with him

Ridley Jacobs, the wicketkeeper, gave Lara the company he needed at the other end for the rest of the innings, and the sixth-wicket pair added an unbroken 282 from 470 balls, Jacobs finishing unbeaten himself on 107, his own century almost overshadowed entirely by what was happening at the other end. Gareth Batty bowled 52 overs in the innings and finished with figures of 2 for 185, a measure of how difficult it was for England to contain, let alone dismiss, a batting order with Lara in this kind of form; Steve Harmison, Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones managed only a wicket apiece between them across the whole innings, while Matthew Hoggard went wicketless altogether from his 18 overs.

Four hundred not out

Lara batted into a third day before he finally declared the innings closed with his own score unbeaten on 400 from 582 balls, faced across roughly 13 hours at the crease. West Indies declared on 751 for 5, and Lara had reclaimed the record for the highest individual score in Test cricket, this time by a margin of 20 runs over Hayden's mark. It remains, as of the CricArcade archive, the highest score by any batter in a Test innings, and the 751 for 5 declared stands among the largest totals ever posted in the long history of Test cricket.

England's reply and Flintoff's century

England, already 3-0 down in the series, responded with defiance rather than damage limitation. Facing such a huge total, their first innings still slipped to 98 for 5, Michael Vaughan out for just 7, Marcus Trescothick for 16, Nasser Hussain for 3 and Mark Butcher for 52 all back in the pavilion, before Andrew Flintoff dug in. He added 84 with the wicketkeeper Geraint Jones, who made 38, and went on to finish unbeaten on 102, carrying England from the brink of a heavy follow-on deficit to a total of 285. Pedro Collins took 4 for 76 with the new ball for West Indies. Even though West Indies chose not to enforce any follow-on, given their own total, England were invited to bat again, and this time batted with real authority: Trescothick and Vaughan put on 182 for the first wicket, Trescothick making 88 and Vaughan going on to 140, and Mark Butcher, with 61, and Nasser Hussain, with 56, both passed fifty as England reached 422 for 5, Graham Thorpe unbeaten on 23 and Geraint Jones unbeaten on 10 at the close, before the match was drawn with time running out on the final day. The match finished as a draw, West Indies' first-innings total of 751 for 5 declared always well out of England's reach across either of their two innings.

The record that has stood since

Lara retired in 2007 having also set the record for the highest score in first-class cricket, 501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham in 1994, and his 400 not out at Antigua remains unmatched in Test cricket two decades on. It is a score that opposing bowlers and captains still measure themselves against whenever a batter begins to threaten a triple century, and it capped a career in which Lara twice held the record for the highest score in Test cricket, the only batter ever to do so. The full scorecard, session by session, is on this page, and both sides' wider Test histories are on the West Indies and England team pages. In The Follow-On you can bat through a full day and see how far past a hundred you can push an innings of your own.

Sources

• CricArcade Test archive: the full scorecard, fall of wickets and partnerships on this page
• ESPNcricinfo: England in West Indies 2003/04, 4th Test scorecard and report
• Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2005: the tour of the West Indies, the fourth Test at Antigua