West Indies cricket captain Brian Lara - file

Nodley Wright, Freelance Writer

THE KEY to winning the 2007 ICC cricket World Cup according to West Indies captain Brian Lara is to pick up momentum.

Lara, who spoke at a press conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montego Bay yesterday ahead of today's warm-up game against 2003 semi-finalists Kenya, expressed satisfaction in not being among the favourites, but still defended his team's chances of taking the title.

"One of the most important things in the tournament is to pick up momentum," Lara said adding that it is the aim of the team right now to create more match-winners in the team to complement the established ones. That, he said, will get them closer to a team such as Australia, which has about 11 match-winners. "It is all about the team that picks up momentum that will carry us through, not the individual," he said, deflecting the attention from himself.

According to Lara, the ideal situation for his team is to start slowly and get better as the tournament goes on.

"We don't want to be one of the front-runners. We want to gradually get into our strides and surprise people coming to the end," the West Indies captain said.

Picking a winner from the eight Test-playing nations will be a difficult thing to do based on the narrow gap between the teams.

"A lot of the Test playing nations are quite competitive and it is very hard to say any one or two countries are going to control the World Cup and win it. Of course, Australia will definitely start favourites because of their statistics and how they have played over the past few years," Lara observed.

But while that may be so, the record of the Caribbean team should also put them in the frame.

"I think personally that the team that I am in charge of, our performances in international tournaments, triangular tournaments ... we have been to almost every finals that has been available to us.

"Before the 2004 ICC championships, we went to the triangular tournament in New Zealand and got to the finals. We won the ICC championships and two years later in the triangular tournament with Australia and India we got to the finals. Then in the ICC Champions Cup maybe four five months ago we got to the finals before losing out to Australia."

That record, according to Lara, demonstrates that the team has the players to do the job and that over the past couple of years the standard has definitely been raised and the West Indies have a team that could get to the World Cup final.

The much decorated captain also added they will take full advantage of the presence of current team manager Clive Lloyd, who guided the West Indies to the first two World Cup titles in 1975 and 1979.