Moments before midnight on Thursday, Robin Smith telephoned with the numbing news we had feared for most of the week. Malcolm Marshall had died. Cancer of the colon got him during the early summer and, in a remorseless pursuit, nailed him before the autumn leaves finished their fall. He was forty-one years old.
Marshall’s last Test match in England was at the Oval in 1991. Smith recalled how he ground out for nearly five hours against typically accurate fast bowling that allowed him no quarter. He remembered vividly how stuck he became with his score at 98 and how Marshall, sensing the unease, altered his field to place another slip and leave just two men on the leg side. Three balls later he bowled a soft half-volley at leg stump which Smith pushed comfortably into the vast open space at mid-wicket. Smith is certain Marshall gave him that hundred. Marshall, to the end, would not have a bit of it.
A remarkable cricketer and a very special person has gone. If there was an element of ruthlessness about Marshall’s bowling, there was not a hint of anything but warmth and generosity in his personality. He was a sportsman driven by self-belief, ambition and hope, but always he remained a players’ man – forever lifting spirits, experimenting and educating both friend and foe in the nets, suggesting this and demanding that. His high standards set the tone for teams in which he played and coached. It was not always possible for lesser talents to climb the mountain that ‘Macko’ managed, but it was fun trying and more fun still to watch at first hand his own astonishing deeds.
He was a cricketer of indomitable spirit, immense will, utter dedication and supreme skill. He took 376 Test match wickets and 1,651 in all first-class cricket – 823 of those for Hampshire in a county career which began at the snow-covered racecourse ground in Derby in 1979 and finished when the knackering diet of a four-day county championship and three one-day competitions became too much for him in 1993. Briefly, he then played for Natal in South Africa, leading them to the Castle Cup at the first attempt.
In Barbados, trophy after trophy, honour after honour, came his way. His closest friends, Desmond Haynes and Joel Garner, who were with him through the glory years, were with him in his final moments, as, of course, was Connie, his wife. She said he went peacefully, without pain. His own father had died in a motorcycle accident before the boy had got out of the cot. It was his grandfather, Oscar Welch, who introduced him to the game and played with him day and night. The young Marshall preferred batting – always did, actually, and he could play a bit, too – but learnt in the playground at school that you didn’t get a knock unless you bowled out the bloke who was on strike. So he skipped in fifteen yards, hit a few fellas on the head and castled the rest.
By heaven, he could bowl quickly when he chose – Bobby Parks, our wicketkeeper, was thirty-one paces back one day at Portsmouth – and the skidding, screaming bouncer was the most chilling part of his armoury. Yet his real talent was in understanding his opponents, conditions and pitches and in being able to adapt. He was a natural outswinger of the ball and by the late 1980s, when he had mastered the inswinger, he at times appeared almost unplayable.
In 1992 Hampshire were bowled out cheaply by Essex in a crucial Benson and Hedges match. Marshall, who was desperate for a day at Lord’s with his beloved adopted county, won the match in minutes by trapping Graham Gooch, John Stephenson and Mark Waugh lbw to leave Essex on the ropes at five for three. He finished with four for 20, the man-of-the-match award and, two months later, the cup itself.
Gooch thought him the finest bowler he played against. Viv Richards calls him the greatest of all fast bowlers – ‘the man with the biggest heart and the smartest brain’. For my part, I shall remember the laughter, the dancing eyes, and the incessant, always enthusiastic, chatter. If much of Malcolm characterised the calypso cricketer, much too epitomised the model professional. From Sydney to Southampton, in Barbados, Bournemouth and Bangalore, Malcolm Marshall was a man for all seasons.
Malcolm Denzil Marshall: b Bridgetown, Barbados, 18 April 1958; d 4 November 1999