Former Australian captain Ian Chappell rates Brian Lara as a superior batsman to the resurgent Ricky Ponting and little master Sachin Tendulkar.

Chappell says Lara's ability to amass big scores for the West Indies and his "innate knowledge" on targeting specific bowlers to score quickly makes him a better batsman than Australia's Ponting and India's Tendulkar.

"Tendulkar gains a lot of support because he is idolised in a country of more than a billion people, he was compared to Sir Donald Bradman by the man himself and is on the verge of scoring 100 international centuries, a remarkable feat," Chappell wrote in his column for the Daily Telegraph.