Lara confirms retirement from ODI cricket

GRENADA: One of the legends of cricket and West Indian captain Brian Lara has confirmed that he is retiring from one-day format of the game.

"I think this is the end of my one-day career, for sure," Lara said after the his team's Super Eight loss to South Africa in the cricket World Cup here on Tuesday.

"I honestly feel that my game is over and we should give it to one of the younger players. It's really tough playing one-day internationals out there. After the World Cup the next one-day tournament for the West Indies is in June in England and I would love to sit back and watch and see the team do well," he said.

Lara said he would like to see his team improve in the one-day internationals.

"I want to leave a team that play better. And that is still my hope. These might be my last two one-day internationals but I still want to see the team moving out of this competition learning something from it and that's all I can hope for. It's demoralising yes but I want to see certain things happen and I want to see the team move on," he said.

Lara has played 297 ODIs and scored 10,354 runs at 40.60 with 19 hundreds and 63 half-centuries.