Famous Cricketers No 52 - Malcolm Marshall

MALCOLM MARSHALL Friday 10 September 1999 was a beautiful late summer day. At Northlands Road the Hampshire and Somerset bowlers were unable to find any life in a pitch which was responsible for the most turgid of drawn matches. Hampshire’s coach, Malcolm Marshall watched the cricket from the players’ balcony and during the tea interval took his ten year old son Mali onto the outfield and bowled to him. The young man hit the tennis ball very hard and very cleanly – the older man expected and encouraged a proper performance. That was Malcolm Marshall’s last appearance at a Hampshire match. In less than two months he was dead. It is a fault of cricket that it can be over sentimental and excessively nostalgic. In such circumstances as these however, we recognise that memories are so precious that they must be treated with respect. Anyone who has followed cricket over the past twenty years will have recollections of Malcolm Marshall and for those of us fortunate enough to have been involved with his main sides, Barbados, West Indies, Hampshire or Natal the memories will be particularly vivid. This is partly because Malcolm Marshall was a great cricketer and in particular a great fast bowler. It does not matter whether we can call him the greatest, it is enough to observe that he shared a platform with every great fast bowler from David Harris, the first great fast bowler of the Hambledon era, to Curtley Ambrose. In the particular context and circumstances of international cricket in the 1980s his bowling was as fine as any player has ever produced. Because he was physically strong, skilful, intelligent, determined and aggressive he would have achieved as much in any other circumstances or period. Malcolm Marshall grew up in the demanding but fundamentally gentle society of Barbados at the time when cricket was the dominant cultural activity for young men. By his own account he toyed with wicket-keeping and generally preferred batting but learned to bowl fast because that was the only way to claim occupation of the crease. He was never built like a fast bowler but developed his crucial shoulder action at a young age. He bowled with open-chested action which helped his inswinger and, even as a coach would suggest that this ‘natural’ action was an insurance against the back injuries suffered by many bowlers with classic side-on actions. Through intelligence he knew or deduced his opponents’ weaknesses, loved setting traps and added variations of movement, length and pace to his typical delivery. As a human being Marshall was as friendly and obliging as any cricketer I have met – until he stepped onto a cricket field. Then, whatever the circumstances or status of the match, he was a fearsome opponent. No cricketers knew this better than the English batsmen of the 1980s although he reserved some of his most venomous performances for the Indians, believing that they had cheated him out for a duck in his first Test innings. Vengsarkar in particular lived to regret his vociferous appeal at Bangalore in 1978. Just occasionally the aggression would overwhelm the intelligence but as he matured this was less and less likely to happen. Two matches at Portsmouth illustrate the point. In the first in 1983 Hampshire forced Gloucestershire to follow on. Marshall’s 3-29 included Gloucestershire’s star batsman Zaheer Abbas. In the second innings Marshall clearly felt that Zaheer was frightened and attacked him with a succession of short balls. Zaheer ducked and weaved, playing a number of 4