From the road: the UAE, July 2026 — written between conversations on the trip, after someone said: “you travel a lot — you must have met so many interesting people.” This is the story Dennis told.
You never know who you’ll end up sitting next to on a plane, or in an airport lounge.
A couple of years ago, in the very early hours of the morning, I walked into the Emirates lounge in Dubai and found it unusually packed — every seat taken, hours to kill, nowhere to sit. Normally at that time it’s empty. I did lap after lap, hunting, and finally spotted a table of four: one chair taken, three vacant. The man in it had a cap pulled down tight, tilted forward so you couldn’t see his face, collars up. “Excuse me — do you mind if I sit down?” He looked around the room, as if hoping to find somewhere else I could go, saw that there wasn’t anywhere, and gestured at the chairs.
Right, I thought. This bloke doesn’t want to be disturbed. No worries, mate …
Glad just to have a seat, I sat quietly with the menu. The place was so busy it took fifteen minutes for a waiter to reach us. “Anything that’s easy for the kitchen — a cheeseburger and a bottle of water, please.” The waiter turned to the other chap, who said, in a thick West Indian accent: “Same please. Cheeseburger and a water, thanks.”
Do you ever get the feeling someone wants to talk?
Every now and then he’d glance at me, and I got the sense he was wondering why I wasn’t talking to him. It felt a little strange, to be honest. Eventually he broke the ice. “Where you flying to?” Manila, I said — and you? “Joburg,” he said. “For work.”
Now the conversation was on. Joburg — what’s that, nine hours? He laughed: “yeah, ’bout dat.” Had I been? Many, many times. He asked heaps of questions about my work, and we talked mining and recruitment, and he asked about diamonds — had I seen big ones? He’d toured the diamond companies’ headquarters a few times, he said, and seen some amazing jewels.
I thought he was a diamond buyer
So I asked him: what do you do? “I’m a cricket coach,” he said — then quickly added, “a high-performance cricket coach. I’m travelling for work.”
And I said: “So, you play a bit of cricket, mate?” And he said no — he used to, a long time ago. Not now.
Do I like cricket?
Then he asked whether I liked cricket, and did I watch it. Which is when I launched into full cricket-tragic mode: watching test matches from the fence as a kid because I didn’t have money for a ticket; later, tests at the Gabba in Brisbane; how far back the keeper stood for the world’s fastest bowlers and the thud of the ball into the gloves that you could hear high in the stands; the relay throw the Aussies started from the boundary. I was on fire.
His face was alight. He started talking about being young, when a test match meant the whole town crowded around a wireless, glued to commentators painting the picture with words — where every fielder stood, all of it. In his home town in Trinidad the nights were usually noisy, he said, but when the West Indies were playing away against Australia the radios came on late — the broadcast started at ten at night because of the time difference.
His father and his father’s friend would listen intently, and as a young boy with school in the morning he’d be sent to bed — but the pull of cricket was too strong. He’d sit behind the door listening until he fell asleep in the early hours. When a test was on, he laughed, he was useless at school. Almost no sleep. Cricket was far too important to miss.
Then he mentioned that he’d played himself when he was younger — made the national side.
WHAT. Wait a minute. You must have been pretty good to make the West Indies side. Can I ask your name?
“My name is Brian Lara”
And I said: you must think I’m a moron. No, no, he said — it was one of the best conversations about the love of cricket he’d had since he was a small boy talking with his father.
I told him what was true: that like millions of others around the world I’d been captivated by his batting, and that my dad was going to pass out when he heard about our little chat. I never asked for an autograph or a photo. We just kept talking. He opened up about how “seeing” cricket through radio commentary had shaped him — having to visualise the whole ground in his head, working out field placements from memory. He talked about the 153 not out against Australia at Bridgetown in ’99, his love of Sydney, and how his daughter is named Sydney after the 277 he made at the SCG in ’93. And he talked about the pain of losing his good friend Shane Warne — how he still misses him.
He was a pleasure to listen to, and I’m grateful to have met him. We talked for hours: two strangers passing time in an airport lounge, one of whom used to play a bit of cricket …
For the non-cricket readers: Brian Charles Lara (born 2 May 1969, Trinidad) is widely regarded as one of the greatest batsmen ever to play the game. He still holds the highest individual score in first-class cricket — 501 not out, in 1994 — and the highest in a Test innings: 400 not out, against England in 2004.
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