A MONTH AFTER the first renegade side left for South Africa, the Test team were playing again, this time at home to India. It was a sign of the West Indies’ strength that, despite the fracture caused by the apartheid tours, only Gus Logie in the first Test and Winston Davis in the fifth made their debuts. The team could prosper without the rebels. They would not be missed.
Since the surprising defeat to New Zealand at the beginning of 1980 Clive Lloyd’s side had won three Test series as well as retaining the Frank Worrell Trophy in Australia. By the time the rebel players were counting their final krugerrands, the Test side had won two more. Five series victories. Undefeated against Pakistan, Australia and India, and the first side since Donald Bradman’s Australians in 1948 not to lose a first-class game on tour in England. The West Indies were now unchallenged as the best side in cricket. What better way to confirm it than by winning the World Cup for the third time?
The 1983 competition was held in England. The West Indies had a little shock when they were beaten by India at Old Trafford in their first group game. Still, there was nothing much to worry about. India were seen as a poor side whose only other victory in three World Cups had been against the amateurs and club players of East Africa in 1975. They had a new captain, Kapil Dev, who was quarrelling with Sunil Gavaskar, his predecessor and the team’s star batsman. Gavaskar was out of form and was dropped for one of the games. India seemed underprepared. After all, they hadn’t even played a one-day international game in their own country until 1981.
So there was some surprise when India also beat Australia and England to get to the final at Lord’s. There they would play Clive Lloyd’s team again. The West Indies hadn’t lost since that first game in Manchester. Their semi-final win against Pakistan at the Oval was an easy one; even the leg spin and googlies of Abdul Qadir, which had tormented Desmond Haynes and Vivian Richards, couldn’t throw them off course.
‘I don’t see us slipping up again,’ said Lloyd the day before the final when asked if India could repeat the success of their group game. ‘We’re more relaxed now and playing well.’ Richards was scoring runs, and the four fast bowlers – Garner, Marshall, Roberts and Holding – were either quicker or cannier than ever. Marshall even had the confidence to order a new BMW sports car, which he would pay for from his winnings after the final. Relaxed and playing very well indeed.
India batted and still had more than five overs left of their allowance of 60 when they were bowled out. They made 183, at least 40 runs short of a decent score. The young Barbadian bowler had taken two wickets; he was almost running his finger along his new walnut dashboard.
India were a side of medium-pace bowlers – a bit of seam movement here, a little wobble through the air there – nothing that the experienced West Indies feared. But wickets fell. Richards, who had been clubbing boundaries from Madan Lal, played too soon when trying to hook him to the stands. His top edge went high and over mid-wicket, but, running back, Kapil Dev took a fine over-the-shoulder catch. It was the moment of the game. The West Indies were unable to control the bowling that remained. Lloyd, with a twanged groin, was out for eight on the same score as Larry Gomes, and then the careful Jeff Dujon fell. The world champions were 124 for 8, then 126 for 9. There would be no last-wicket miracle stand from Garner and Holding. At 7.30 p.m. the final wicket fell, and to general amazement and not a little delight from many watching, India had won the World Cup. Spectators from all sides but the pavilion speedily flooded the ground. A West Indian supporter in a mustard-coloured suit lay face down on the grass, unable to watch. In the scrum and run for the dressing rooms Michael Holding injured his leg and had to have it put in plaster.
‘Hordes of fans poured across the hallowed turf straight at the members’ enclosure,’ wrote the Sunday Times sketch writer, ‘enabling some of the senior incumbents to relive in imagination their more alarming imperial experiences.’
With a side dependent on gritty players from the looked-down-upon north of the country rather than the traditional cricket city of Bombay, India had enjoyed the most unlikely of victories. Kapil Dev’s matey captaincy had abandoned the master–pupil relationship that previous Indian sides had been expected to recognise and changed the way India has viewed its cricket ever since. The huge tremor of this win meant that in India, one-day cricket would now rule over the five-day Test, and during the next 25 years, India would become the dominant economic and political force in the world game, generating billions of dollars in television money. The win at Lord’s in the 1983 World Cup was the Big Bang moment for this new universe.
In the West Indies dressing room there was a hell of a row. The bowlers blamed the batsmen, and Lloyd bawled out Andy Roberts for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. What they had seen today was a performance of amateurs, the captain said. There was disbelief, anger and humiliation. As the recriminations went on, Lloyd had something else to add – he was resigning.
‘“I have had enough,” he said. “Somebody else can take over,”’ is what Malcolm Marshall remembered. ‘It left us still further dumbfounded. Our “father” was going to desert his “children” in their hour of need.’ Lloyd made it official that evening in the Wellington Suite of the Westmorland Hotel opposite Lord’s. In front of the team, WICBC members and journalists he said he’d spoken to his wife and together they had decided that it was time to go. ‘West Indies cricket woke up this morning with the realisation that not only have they been dethroned as World Cup champions but that after nine years they now have to look for a new captain’ said the sports lead article in the next day’s Gleaner in Jamaica.
‘We lost that World Cup because of complacency,’ says Michael Holding. ‘The West Indies team thought, This is a cakewalk. We will just go out there and get the runs. If I don’t get them, then five or six will get them. We pretty much gave them the match because we thought that irrespective of how we played we would win. Clive said that he was finished because it had become so acrimonious in the dressing room. He said, “It will all fall on me. I am happy to resign and walk away from it.” It was not a happy time.’
Andy Roberts disagrees: ‘I do not think it was complacency; I just think we batted badly on that day. Bowlers win matches. Batsmen draw or lose us matches. Now we’ve bowled first and we bowled out India for 183. Our batsmen could not score us 183. After 1975, as the years go by, I study the games, and every single cup we play, we have to bat bad once. Once. And it just happened that the one time we choose to bat badly was in the final.’
For several weeks the West Indies had no captain. Eventually the board persuaded Lloyd to change his mind, and he took the side to India at the end of 1983. They won all five of the one-day internationals and the Test series.
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India’s win in the 1983 World Cup was such a surprise not least because it came against the West Indies’ best four fast bowlers of the era: Roberts, Holding, Marshall and Garner. All were extremely difficult to play against, and even the very best batsmen were apprehensive about facing them. But they played together in just seven Test matches and never more than four games in a row. This was because, as Marshall’s promise was becoming increasingly obvious, Roberts’s career was ending. When the side went to India at the end of 1983 Holding and Marshall led the attack. ‘Who wants the new ball?’ asked Clive Lloyd. ‘Give it to Malcolm,’ said Holding immediately. ‘He’s the fastest now.’ Very soon afterwards Marshall would replace Roberts, the man from whom he’d learned so much.
Deryck Murray reckons that Holding was the fastest of the bowlers he kept wicket to, but Roberts was the best. No other bowler was as intelligent or had such strength. His great rounded shoulders were like cannonballs. Once, to emphasise his point of view, Roberts lifted Dennis Lillee up by his lapels in the lobby of the Old Melbourne Inn. He tried to make every ball he bowled different from the last, with small variations of angle and trajectory that would unsettle a batsman. He combined nous with extreme pace. Roberts, more so than any other modern West Indian bowler, possessed the skills that C. L. R. James described as being ‘the result of psychological sensitivity and response to a particular batsman at a particular time on a particular wicket at a particular stage in the game’.
‘I wish people would remember me for my outswinger,’ says Roberts. But he will always be best known for the cunning of those two-speed bouncers.
‘If I grip the ball here to bowl a bouncer,’ says Roberts, putting his fingers across the seam of a cricket ball and not either side of it,
the ball hits the ground on the shiny side and it’s not going to bounce. It’s going to skid. Skid onto the batsman. If it hits the seam then it will rear. In order to bowl the two-pace bouncer, the first one I would run in and don’t jump, I will go straight through and don’t jump at all in my delivery stride, and the ball will come on at normal pace. Now if I run in and I jump, for me to jump I have to put in more effort to elevate to a certain height and in doing that I am also transferring that effort into the delivery, so that is where you get the difference in pace. The second one would come on to you quicker. A lot quicker.
Like most things Roberts did on a cricket field, it was carefully planned. ‘I wasn’t a big party man – I didn’t drink – so most nights I would stay in my room and think about cricket. We didn’t have laptops or DVDs of our matches, so my own memory was my computer.’
Roberts had a lot of processing power. Clive Lloyd tells the story of playing against him in the West Indies in the Shell Shield competition, Guyana versus the Combined Islands. ‘He bounced me viciously. Usually he didn’t say much, but he came down the pitch and went, “That’s for hooking me for six in Dominica.” The shot he was referring to had been played five years previously. He’d waited that long to give me his quicker bouncer.’
‘I am a warrior,’ say Roberts simply. ‘I have a job to do, and when I go on a cricket field I have no friends; all my friends are back in the pavilion. But if a batsman gets injured it is very difficult for me to go and look at him, because if you get up to bat again, the next ball I ball to you may be another bouncer. No, the sympathy is in here,’ he says, tapping his chest. ‘You may not see it and I can’t show the batsman, but it is in here.’
Apart from bouncers, Roberts had a lesser-known skill that also confounded batsmen. Experienced players would look at the ball in the bowler’s hand as he ran in. They would note which side of the ball had been polished so they could predict which way it would swing when it was bowled. But Roberts was able, after hours of practice, to flick the ball around 180 degrees in his hand in the moments before he let it go in his delivery stride. The shine was now on the other side, and many batsmen expecting the outswinger were LBW or bowled by a ball that swerved back into them.
That finesse was learned over several years. When Roberts began, he was what he calls an ‘out-and-out fast man’ bowling straight. Now and again he’d let go of a ball that came back into the batsman. Then he read in a newspaper that the old England fast bowler Fred Trueman thought he was good but not great. But he could be great if he brought his arms higher.
‘In Australia in ’75–76 I changed my action, got my arms higher at the point of the gather and learned to swing the ball away from the right hander. And that was my most regular delivery. But whatever I did, in my mind I became a batsman. I used to think what I would be able to do if a particular delivery was bowled at me. That’s why the batsman was often presented with the unexpected.’
No West Indian bowler was closer to Roberts than Michael Holding.
They first met on a bench in Jamaica, twelfth men on opposite sides in a match against the Combined Islands. They chatted and became friendly. ‘When I got into the West Indies team, we became room-mates and talked a lot,’ recalls Holding.
I got to realise that Andy’s cricket brain was brilliant. Not everyone who is great at their craft has the ability to pass that on. He taught me a lot about fast bowling, about studying batsmen, seeing their weaknesses and their strengths. I’ll give you a fine example. We were in India in ’83. Andy was ill and he didn’t play in this Test match. Might have been Kanpur. I was out there bowling to Syed Kirmani. Andy was in the dressing room and noticed something about him. At the next water break he sent out a message with the twelfth man who said, ‘Go round the wicket. Don’t bowl anything short, just attack his leg stump.’ I didn’t know why Andy said that, but I had so much faith in him that I did what he suggested. In that same over Kirmani lost his leg stump and was walking back to the pavilion.
Like Roberts, Holding developed into an intelligent, crafty bowler. At the beginning of his career he had presented batsmen with little else than sheer speed. ‘I had the advantage of being able to bowl at 90 miles per hour, but only rarely did I swing the ball a lot. In England it would go if I bowled very full, but in most countries I depended on hitting the seam regularly and getting movement that way. Whichever batsman I had to bowl to, left or right, I wanted to move the ball away from him. Doing that meant there was no second line of defence. He just had his bat and not his pad.’
Holding’s great speed was enhanced by a run-up of extreme grace. Few bowlers could match it. Since being a teenager he had run well. He had been a fine long jumper and hurdler (but not the champion 400-metre runner that many think he was) so had experience of having to plant his foot in the right place every time he competed. Holding bowled very few no balls as a Test cricketer. The discipline of his youth meant that he never had to concentrate on running in smoothly. This talent was brought on by the West Indies’ trainer Dennis Waight, who got all of his bowlers to practise their approach to the stumps at full speed while blindfolded. They all really could bowl with their eyes shut.
‘As far as I am concerned, bowling is about action and reaction,’ says Holding.
You bowl a ball; you see the reaction of the batsman. What do I need to do now to combat that action of the batsman? That’s what I’m thinking about walking back to my mark. OK, he did that when I pitched the ball in a particular area – what can I do? It is a continuous process. A bowler is always thinking about what the batsman did. Remembering the last delivery. If that batsman is going to be an outstanding player, he has got to forget that last delivery and focus on the next one.
That might be difficult for Geoffrey Boycott. The England batsman will remember one particular over from Holding for the rest of his life. At the Kensington Oval in March 1981 he received six balls of such quality that many people believe it to be the best over by a fast bowler in modern cricket. Boycott had practised facing Holding, Roberts, Croft and Garner before the tour started by batting indoors in Yorkshire on a polished wooden floor to mimic the sheen, skid and speed of a Caribbean wicket, but on the second day of the third Test at the start of England’s innings in Barbados, that did him little good.
Holding had been told by Clive Lloyd before the West Indies went out to field that he only wanted a short spell from him – three or four of the fastest overs he could bowl.
The first ball to Boycott was short of a length on off stump, and the batsman played it uncomfortably high off his gloves to just in front of second slip. To the next three balls he played and missed as Holding got faster and faster and the crowd got noisier. The fifth ball headed for the batsman’s throat, and again only his glove saved him. Before the last ball of the over Holding decided that Boycott would be expecting another short one. He had noticed too that the batsman had deliberately been playing inside the line of the ball – not getting his bat or his feet fully towards off stump. The sixth ball was full. It moved at great speed and away a little from the straight. Boycott’s off stump was jettisoned from the earth. Four slips, a gully, a wicket-keeper and short leg all danced towards the bowler in congratulation.
‘Bridgetown exploded,’ wrote Scyld Berry in the Observer. ‘They had come over the walls and through the fences, they had sat on the stand roofs with such an expectation in mind. And Holding fulfilled it when, after five short deliveries he sent his off stump cartwheeling back to the wicket-keeper.’
Later that evening Frank Keating of the Guardian went with Boycott to the hotel room of the BBC reporter Michael Blakey, who had been editing a TV news item and had the film of the batsman’s humiliation. Staring at the small portable screen, Boycott asked for the over to be replayed four or five times. ‘At the end he said knowingly, “Thanks, I think I’ve seen all I need to see.”’
According to Holding, the over has become part of cricket folklore because ‘Geoffrey Boycott goes around the world telling people it was the greatest thing ever. People have jumped on the bandwagon.’ He disagrees. It wasn’t even the best over he remembers bowling. That came in a WSC match against Australia in 1979 when he got both Ian and Greg Chappell out.
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If Michael Holding’s greatest attribute was pace, Joel Garner’s was trajectory. His height meant that the ball – full or short – was always difficult for the batsman to judge. The bounce from the length he bowled most often took the ball into the batsman’s chest rather than past his waist. Such a Garner delivery was too short to drive but too full to cut. The direction – almost always straight – also took away the possibility of deflected runs either side of the wicket.
‘How do I score against Garner?’ Geoffrey Boycott once asked the bowler’s Somerset teammate Ian Botham, the night before England were due to bat against the West Indies. ‘You don’t,’ replied Botham: ‘no one does.’
‘Right. I may as well go to bed then,’ announced Boycott.
Garner also became known as the owner of the world’s most exquisite yorker – a full ball which landed at the batsman’s toes at more than 80 miles per hour – which was extremely difficult to stop from hitting the stumps or his pads. It was taught to him by the Barbadian Test bowler Charlie Griffith, and he mastered it early in his career. Later, Vanburn Holder would teach him how to bowl the outswinger when all he had known previously was how to nip the ball back into the batsman.
The skills Joel Garner already possessed, as well as those he learned, made him possibly better than all of his fast-bowling peers except Malcolm Marshall. Garner was thought of as a supporting bowler rather than as one to lead the attack with the new ball, but alongside Holding, Roberts, Croft and Daniel, only Marshall took more wickets, bowled more Test overs and had a lower average (by three hundredths of a run) than Joel Garner. And no one went for fewer runs per over.
C. L. R. James once wrote a very brief letter to The Times cricket correspondent John Woodcock. It read, ‘Garner is not, I repeat not, a fast bowler.’ But he was. Especially towards the end of his career. After he was dropped in 1983 he came back against Australia at the end of the year, lengthened his run-up and took the new ball. He took 31 wickets in the series – a record – and had never bowled quicker. Only Marshall hit the keeper’s gloves harder that year.
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Colin Croft began as a wicket-keeper. Then he got tall and realised he could bowl fast. By 1969 he had a fearsome reputation in youth cricket in Guyana. Within a decade people felt similarly about him in Test cricket. What made Croft uniquely difficult to bat against was the angle from which he bowled the ball.
‘It was not until I played for the West Indies,’ he says, ‘that I fully realised that I bowled from so wide of the crease. So the ball always gave the batsman the impression that it was coming in at him. They reasoned that, if the ball started so wide, it had to dart in. That’s why I worked really hard at doing the opposite – bowling a leg cutter that would leave the right hander.’
Croft always preferred cut to swing.
A fast bowler has got tools. You’ve got an outswinger or an inswinger, but personally I don’t agree with the swing bowling because the ball is only new for so long. So I liked to manipulate the ball off the pitch, which is known as cut. The ball comes in a straight line, hits the seam and then deviates towards the slips, that’s a leg cutter. If it deviates into a right-handed batsmen, that’s an off cutter. Now to me that’s more useful because you could bowl it for longer and it happens later in the delivery. Therefore the batsmen has to think very much quicker to play the ball that cuts.
Infamously, Croft also had another weapon. The bouncer. Every fast bowler is happy for people to be afraid of him; some just hide it better than others. The former England all-rounder Vic Marks once said of the West Indies’ bowlers, ‘Joel didn’t really want to hurt you. Michael was a gentleman. But I always got the feeling with dear Colin that he wasn’t really that bothered if he caused you a great deal of pain.’ Croft ran up straight and fast, almost behind the umpire, then leaped out towards the return crease while flinging down the ball with a rapid untangling of his arms.
‘Now, if the batsmen can’t get himself out of the way, then I genuinely think you should not be playing, because cricket is a game that goes on reflexes. You take catches as a wicket-keeper, silly point, you take reflex catches. Now here’s a guy coming into bowl from 22 yards away; he’s bowling at about 90 miles per hour, so it takes about one half of a second to get to you. If your reflexes are that slow, you shouldn’t be playing.’
If the bouncer missed the bat and hit the man, Croft was untroubled by remorse. ‘I grew up in a very different way to most people who played cricket for the West Indies.’ His childhood in Guyana was very difficult. ‘I’ve seen people kill people,’ he says.
When I hit somebody, that was the end of that. I’d go back to my mark and sit down and wait until somebody else comes to bat or he gets up and I could not be bothered how hurt you were. My simple theory as a fast bowler was I’m gonna get you out by any means necessary, so I’ll either get you out legally, caught behind, bowled, or if I could knock you out, that’s OK too. I remember Alvin Kallicharran asking me one time, ‘Why don’t you go look at the batsman; he’s on the ground?’ I said, ‘Well look, I know about aviation; I don’t know anything about doctoring. I can’t fix him. Call a doctor.’ That’s the end of that and I was being very, very honest. I know exactly what I planned to do. I bowl a bouncer, it hit the batsman. I was successful and therefore I don’t care about the result.
Of course I’m a warrior. I’m representing millions of people. When the warrior walks out onto the field, it is not a playing field. It’s a war zone. Whoever comes out of there after 50 overs or after a Test match alive, well and victorious, then good luck.
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Malcolm Marshall won matches for both Clive Lloyd and his successor as captain, Vivian Richards. In the last 18 months of Lloyd’s reign and the first year of Richards’s appointment he took more than 20 wickets every time he played a Test series. That included 33 wickets at the end of 1984 in India, a place where fast bowlers had almost always been muffled and blunted by the baked-mud pitches. The bowler to whom Marshall is most often compared, Dennis Lillee, only went to the subcontinent once, to play Pakistan, and came home with three wickets from as many games.
At the beginning of his career Marshall came off the long run. Which self-respecting Caribbean quick bowler didn’t? Later on he shortened his approach when he realised it didn’t cause his pace to drop. Marshall was small for a West Indies fast bowler, just five feet ten inches; his Barbadian partner Joel Garner was almost a foot taller. So he didn’t lope to the wicket, getting up to speed like a cargo plane heading for take-off; he scampered in like a messenger boy holding an urgent telegram. When he delivered the ball, there was great pace for sure, but the ball skidded through in a way that a taller bowler couldn’t have pulled off. That made him harder to hook.
Much of Marshall’s craft was learned and then perfected in county cricket. He spent 14 summers with Hampshire. He wasn’t instantly brilliant. Mark Nicholas, a teammate and later his county captain, remembers him arriving in 1979, already a Test cricketer. ‘He was whippy and awkward to play, but not much more than that,’ says Nicholas. ‘That season he bowled outswing exclusively. We saw talent but not a world-beater. His first game was at the end of April in Derby. It was so cold there may even have been snow. Anyway he arrived in a pair of sandals and just wanted to snuggle up to the radiator. We had to help him buy socks and shoes and a big jumper.’
Marshall learned quickly about bowling fast in England. He improved almost by the hour, says Nicholas. When he came back in 1980 he was a much better bowler, but neither he nor Gordon Greenidge were with the county for long because of the West Indies tour of England. In 1981 he was very good and by 1982 he was extraordinary, taking 134 wickets in the county championship, more than 40 ahead of the next-best bowler. And it was the top batsmen he damaged most. Just 14 of those wickets were the numbers nine, ten and eleven in the opposition batting order.
His fine speed was matched by great control. In his later Tests he learned to fold his thumb into his palm behind the ball, rather than using it to support the seam from underneath. When he splayed his fingers either side, he said he got even more control. From the 1982 season he could cut the ball by rotating the seam with his rolling wrist. After Dennis Lillee once confounded him with a ball that pitched on his legs but passed the outside edge of his bat, he asked him how it was done. Lillee showed him the leg cutter and he in turn passed on the secret to Imran Khan. Lillee had been taught it by John Snow. The modern Test leg cutter came from Sussex and eventually returned there with Imran. But Marshall still had one more skill to master.
The start of the 1985 county season was an interesting one for Hampshire because Marshall didn’t often bowl super-quick. He was teaching himself the inswinger. He’d cut back his pace to do it so he wasn’t quite at his best. He’d spent hours in the nets and in matches bowled quite a few balls that batsmen didn’t have to play. That was unusual. He wanted long spells – apart from doing 500 sit-ups a day, that’s how he kept fit – and he’d often ask to bowl for an hour and a half without change on the first morning. Then, within about five weeks, the inswinger clicked, and he was absolutely magnificent.
‘He became deadly because batsmen who thought they could line him up around off stump were getting bowled or trapped in front,’ remembers Nicholas.
Lillee had retired and Malcolm was undisputedly the greatest bowler in the world. He could be breathtaking in Barbados, which was a very bouncy surface, and we know that his bouncer, like Andy Roberts’s, was a shocking thing. But his greatness meant that he wasn’t dependent on that sort of wicket. In fact there is an argument that he was a better bowler on wickets that kept low because of his skid and his cut. Viv always used to say that you could put a bunch of these bowlers in the hat, pull one out, and any would bowl well, but the only one he’d want to take to India was Maco.
Marshall could now swing the ball both ways, towards and away from a bat. The pace came mostly from the very fast rotation of his arm in the delivery stride. He had plenty of those fast-twitch fibres in his muscles that Dennis Waight loved so much. ‘You couldn’t buy ’em,’ said Waight; ‘you were born with ’em.’ Marshall showed his chest to the batsman, letting go of the ball front on, but there was no clue from his body as to which way it would go. Sometimes, says Nicholas, he could try to do too much, use too many varieties, but at his best he could do anything he liked.
‘Against Essex in a Benson and Hedges cup game he did Mark Waugh – who was a very fine batsman for Australia – with outswinger, outswinger, inswinger, the last one catching him LBW. He’d already done Gooch and John Stephenson the same way, and they were three down for hardly any.’
Marshall was not a sledger, but like all of the West Indies fast bowlers of the time his charity towards batsmen came in limited doses. And he had a vindictive streak. Some opponents were frightened by it. Mark Nicholas tells the story of how Marshall was once met by two Essex tail-enders, Ray East and David Acfield, in the car park on the morning of a Hampshire county game. Marshall was wondering why the old pros were offering to carry his bags to the dressing room. On the way there, they explained. If Mr Marshall would be good enough to bowl them straight half-volleys when they came in – no short stuff – they would both happily let the ball take out middle stump straight away.
‘He didn’t like Essex,’ says Nicholas. ‘Always went very hard at Essex. He found the playfulness of people like East and Acfield irritating – he took cricket very seriously – and he would bowl more nastily to a joker down the order than one who fought him.’
Marshall especially disliked the Indian batsman Dilip Vengsarkar, whose many appeals he believed had contributed to him being wrongly given out in his first Test match in Bangalore in 1978. With Vengsarkar he would often switch to bowl around the wicket, giving the Indian less space to move against his fastest and most testing short-pitched balls. The favourite wicket of his career was having Vengsarkar caught on the boundary in Antigua six runs short of a hundred. Four years later, in 1987, Marshall still hadn’t forgiven him. In a match at Lord’s to celebrate 200 years of MCC, as soon as Vengsarkar appeared from the pavilion Marshall went around the wicket and skidded short balls towards his throat. ‘There’ve been rumours that Vengsarkar and Marshall might not get on all that well,’ Richie Benaud informed television viewers as the Indian desperately got his bat in front of his face only to see Graham Gooch catch him at third slip.
And there were a couple of others who irked Malcolm, recalls Mark Nicholas.
Once, before a game at Bournemouth, Zaheer Abbas of Gloucestershire said something like, ‘We can look after each other here. You keep it nice and full to me and I’ll block it and score my runs off the others.’ Well that sent Malcolm into an orbital fury. And there was this guy called Rehan Alikhan who played a bit for Sussex and Surrey. Now, with respect, he was tremendously gutsy but not the best of players. Whenever he turned up, Malcolm just couldn’t get him out. And despite his lack of class, Rehan had a little bit of a swagger which always made Malcolm mad. In fact he’s the only batsman I’ve ever heard him sledge. Rehan Alikhan almost drove him to drink. Always brandy of course. He also had a bit of a thing about Graham Roope for some reason.
If Marshall had one limitation – in county cricket at least – it was that he bowled less well to left-handers. ‘He wasn’t as good when they were batting,’ believes Nicholas. ‘I mean, all of this is relative of course because he was probably the best in the world around this time, but there was less authority against left-handers. Chris Broad would drive him nuts. He played Malcolm well. It wasn’t helped by Broady’s manner. He would say little irritating things. Some people shrugged them off as being irrelevant, while others latched on to them and could only reply, “Broady, you’re a tosser.” Malcolm was one of those who latched on.’