The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  If the Big Bird, Joel, is the working-class hero’s prime minister, then Marshall is very much the one true Minister of Culture. Garner, for instance, has built himself, appropriately, the highest and most substantial house on the very foundations of the wooden shack in which his mother brought him up. There is no surprise, when you delve into it, that Marshall loves Hampshire so. He supposes it might have started as his favourite English county when he was a ragged urchin at primary school. The Barbadian cavalier Roy Marshall was the Southern Counties’ most dashing import when the young Malcolm was first at school, and had learned to read.

  He would look up Marshall’s scores, just because of the same name in the paper. Then, when he was fourteen, the other hero, Andy Roberts, joined Hampshire didn’t he? Again he would examine in the Nation the English scoreboards every morning. When he first came to England it was almost natural that he joined Hampshire. In his debut game in April 1979 it snowed. Nevertheless, with three sweaters on he took seven wickets when he was not embracing the dressing-room radiator. Sorry, ‘ragged urchin’ was pathetically romantic. But it is not right. Marshall, they say, was always beautifully turned out for school by his mother and grandmother. First at St Giles primary, where he is now challenging Wes Hall as A1 Alumnus, then at the Parkinson Comprehensive, where he was always immaculate in his khaki shorts and shirt. He was, teachers said last week, a model pupil, a team man.

  Like Gary Sobers, from across the way at Bayland, Marshall’s was a matriarchal boyhood. When Garfield was six his merchant-seaman father’s ship was torpedoed. When Malcolm was still in his cot his policeman father died in a motorcycle accident. Dad had played for the police team. Uncle was a cricketer as well, but it was his grandfather, Oscar, who would bowl to him in the backyard every evening or on the beach on Sundays. The boy loved batting then, and he loves it best now to tell the truth. He would, he admits, dearly enjoy to match Botham, Kapil or Imran as a match-winning Test all-rounder.

  It is touching that he gives thanks to the fortune of having a steady apprenticeship as understudy after his Packer-induced introduction to Test cricket in 1978 after, incredibly, only one first-class game. It followed his debut for Barbados when, just like this week, a set of pallid Jamaicans treated him like sheep for the shearing and his seven wickets got him picked for the tour to India. Marshall was deputy then to the quick quartet and, says Joel, he was always the most cheerful and willing of twelfth men, ready with the drinks, the hot bath and laundry. A few years later Colin Croft sold his soul to South Africa, then Roberts retired . . . now Marshall is in the very pomp of fire and evil on the field. He will be twenty-eight in April, and is possibly still short of his prime.

  There was a perfect example of his awesome, awful talent on Monday. It was heightened by the baying of the crowd. It was like they were at an execution. Tyburn stuff. With only an hour left and still six Jamaican wickets to fall, Marshall threw in a startlingly nasty bouncer from scarcely short of a length that reared from his ribs to graze Davidson’s helmet and, taking off in a screaming fizz, cleared the gloves of the wicketkeeper standing a pitch length back, though he leaped like Shilton. It went at one bounce for four byes. The next fearsome ball seemed exactly the same length and pitch. This time Davidson, scared and weary, ducked his head to the level of his shins, but the ball skidded straight on, hit the nerve that joined his left bicep to his collarbone. As the batsman writhed in his crease, white-faced, he was given out. Plumb leg before, even from the pavilion it was frightening. Poor Davidson rolled away looking drunk with fear and holding his badly bruised, limp arm.

  Marshall cannot explain his knack, except to say he is an athlete, with a supple, rubbery physique. He says he has worked hard to balance himself through his short run-up, so he is always at top speed as he delivers. He looks like Roberts from the ropes, and from twenty-two yards, they say, he has discovered the value of the three-speed bouncer. ‘Give them a few first-gear bouncers and they might get confident: throw in three times as fast and they appear in no position to play it: they are not ready.’ Purists at the old game of chivalry would say there is something sickening, even sadistic, about Marshall’s bowling. He is confident about his defence: ‘Simply, I am a professional. I play to the rules. I am lucky to have my fitness and aggression, but I do not lack sense. I am a fast bowler, this is my job; if I bowl dangerously and I’m told I intimidate, then the umpires are empowered to stop me. When they do I will think of bowling differently; till then, I can only play to the best of my ability, such as it is. I am simply a man who loves cricket and happens to be a fast bowler, a keen professional and a working man with obligations to meet and a new mortgage to pay. I am a man who wants to do his best for himself and his team every time I go to work.’

  The first Test in Jamaica is racing towards the English tourists. Sabina Park will probably be the fastest wicket. Yet Gower has scored a Test century against Marshall at Sabina. ‘I can think of better things than facing him: he is a brilliant bowler, but it is not very nice,’ says the England captain. Gooch has also hit a hundred against him at Sabina, ‘but he is definitely nasty as a proposition’. Lamb has scored three hundreds against Marshall in England – ‘He bounces you at will, and Malcolm must be the nastiest of them all.’

  Last summer at Taunton Botham walked in at 50 for 5, called for his white helmet and, though peppered by ferocious stuff from Marshall, answered fire with fire in a blazing innings of 149 in 106 balls, first dismissing Tremlett and then driving Marshall back with skimmingly crazy two-iron shots over long on or long off, or hooking him off his whiskers into the car park over fine leg. Exasperated, that cold-eyed look and beady fury on his brow, Marshall finally clean-bowled the blond baron of beef, and then went down the wicket with the broadest of grins, embraced his opponent, and clapped him all the way back to the pavilion.

  As Botham said earlier this week, as he vanished up into the Bajan Hills, and into faraway, devious, late-night haunts with his pals Garner and Marshall: ‘Of course we are friends. Malcolm and I relish the contest. He is a magnificent bowler, but he’s a cricketer too. He is an athlete. I always say to the skinny wimp when I get to the wicket, ‘‘What have you in store for me today?’’ Malcolm is unquestionably the quickest and most dangerous man about today. He is no Lillee yet, but he is swinging it and plays it just as hard. But the point with him is everyone has a laugh and a joke afterwards.’

  I asked Marshall if he would remember Botham’s Taunton innings when England faced him in Jamaica this month. ‘I am not sure if I will be selected,’ he said modestly, and at that, from the highest corner of the dressing room, Garner stood up and laughed so much that Marshall had to join in, giggling, and slapping a few nearby palms. Macho, sure, but a jolly nice sportsman as well.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  For my final selections in this section I turn to players still active in the game. In this, the first decade of a new century, there is more international cricket played than ever before. These matches are all telecast live, and frequently to audiences of hundreds of millions. The competition between (and sometimes within) teams is fierce. In terms of class, the batsmen and bowlers yield nothing to their predecessors, and the fielders are hugely superior. From this vast pool I have chosen three truly great cricketers. The first of these is Brian Lara, a little left-hander of supreme skill and a penchant for breaking records, a hero to cricket lovers everywhere and a demigod to his fellow Trinidadians.

  MARTIN JOHNSON

  King of the Willow (1994)

  When Brian Lara finally staggered out from beneath the vast rugby scrum of spectators, film crews and security police that had enveloped him almost before he had raised his bat in triumph, he went down on all fours and planted a kiss on the pitch. This was part emotion at the realization of what he had done, and part relief at the realization that he was still alive. Had he done it in his native Trinidad, where he is comfortably the most idolized figure on the island, they would probably have torn off little bits of him in the d
esperate search for a souvenir. Lara said afterwards that he planned to ‘continue leading a simple life’, but that may prove to be far more difficult than making 375 runs in a Test match.

  From the moment Lara hooked Chris Lewis for four to move from 365, and joint holder with Gary Sobers of the highest individual score in a Test match, to 369, and alone at the top above the greatest cricketer the West Indies has ever produced, it took six minutes for the next ball to be bowled. Somewhere in the pile of bodies around Lara was Sobers himself, who had spent the morning in the home dressing room, and came out personally to offer his congratulations. ‘I could not’, Sobers said, ‘think of a better person to break my record. He is the only batsman today who plays the game as it should be played – with his bat. He never uses his pads, and it is always a pride and joy to watch him play. I had to break someone else’s record [Len Hutton’s] to break the record, and records are always there to be broken.’

  Lara, 320 not out overnight, officially resumed his innings at 10.05 a.m., but it came as no real surprise that he himself had started batting again – in front of his bedroom mirror – at 4 a.m. ‘I woke up, and couldn’t get back to sleep for nerves.’ His hands, he said, were bathed in sweat.

  Before the Test match, Lara played golf with Sobers (who plays off a single-figure handicap) and, having watched him play a few times on this tour, I can confirm that when Lara attempts to hit a stationary ball it is neither a thing of beauty, nor does he manage to make it travel very far in the appropriate direction. At the Caymanas Golf Club in Jamaica, he caused a sizeable logjam on the first tee when his caddie offered him at least five balls before he finally bobbled one past the ladies’ tee, but this merely mirrored two things. One, Lara is such a cult figure that no one dared tell him to get a move on, and two, he is as determined to master golf as he has cricket. Give him a year, and he will be giving Sobers a stroke a hole.

  Not all humility is 100 per cent genuine, but no one who has had any meaningful contact with Lara has ever doubted that he is totally self-effacing. ‘I may have made pressures for myself,’ he said, ‘but I realize that I am only human, and that all it ever takes to get you out is one ball.’ In this match, however, it took England 538 balls before Lara finally thin-edged a drive at Andrew Caddick. Off he went, to be given a hero’s reception into the pavilion by his teammates’ archway of raised bats. Times have changed, though, and when Hutton made his 364, and Sobers his 365, neither of them was hijacked by a satellite-television interviewer before being allowed to get off the field.

  Lara’s innings of 12 hours and 46 minutes took him half an hour less than Hutton, but almost two and a half hours longer than Sobers. Sobers was only twenty-one and making his maiden Test century when he set his record in February 1958, and Lara continued the trend of triple Test-match centurions being relatively young. Given the stamina required, it is not surprising, and of the now thirteen triple hundreds, only Andy Sandham and Graham Gooch have done it past their thirtieth birthdays. Sandham was thirty-nine and Gooch on his way to thirty-eight. The major difference between Lara and Gooch was that, while Gooch looked like he had just hiked across the Sahara by the time he had finished, Lara looked as though he could have batted the full five days without any physical distress. The mental strain, however, was overpowering, and it showed when he fretted and fussed for nearly twenty minutes on 347. Angus Fraser, trundling in as big-heartedly as ever, beat him twice in quick succession, and, as he stood in familiarly brassed-off mode in mid-pitch, was moved to engage his opponent in conversation. ‘I don’t suppose I can call you a lucky bleeder when you’ve got 347,’ Fraser said, which made even Lara blow away some of the tension with a chuckle.

  If Lara is mature beyond what will be twenty-five years in two weeks’ time, then his partner in a stand of 219, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, possesses an equally remarkable temperament, and no little talent himself. When Lara went into his little phase of playing rash strokes, it was Chanderpaul, a nineteen-year-old in his fourth Test if you please, who came down the pitch to offer fatherly advice. Lara’s own father is dead, and the fact that he was not alive to be here yesterday was the one regret Lara expressed after his epic innings. After passing Sandham’s 325 to go to seventh on the all-time list, Lara’s trademark shot off Fraser, a square cut for four, took him past Gooch (333) and Bradman (334) in one blow, and another four, a cover drive off Caddick, saw off both Wally Hammond (336) and Hanif Mohammad (337). A searing extra-cover drive for four then reeled in Hutton (364) and took him level with Sobers, before that final hook off Lewis. As a scrambled single would have done it, this looked like a risk, but Lara said afterwards: ‘I knew he was going to bowl me a bouncer.’

  During the pitch invasion, the person conducting the wildest celebration was a Rastafarian waving a placard with the inscription ‘Blame It On Sir John Hawkins. Slave Trader.’ Whoever Sir John Hawkins might be, this will come as a relief to England’s bowlers, who might otherwise have thought they had had a hand in it. Oddly enough, England’s first impression of Lara in this series was of a nervous, squinting young man playing Devon Malcolm with such desperate unease in the first Test that one feared for his safety. However, it transpired that he has a film-like impediment on both eyes, which will shortly require a minor operation. So there it is. Once Lara can see properly, he should develop into a fairly handy player.

  B. C. PIRES

  Emperor of Trinidad (1998)

  Fancying a challenge on the first day of the second (i.e. the first) Test at the Queen’s Park Oval, I set out to find someone who would be critical of Brian Lara’s debut as West Indies captain on his home ground. All I got was a long walk in the hot sun. It would have been easier to find a Bill Clinton T-shirt in Kenneth Starr’s wardrobe. The only criticism of Lara’s captaincy that has ever been made in Trinidad is that his appointment did not come directly upon his admission to puberty. ‘Someone critical of Lara as captain? Try Walsh,’ suggested a barrister in the Errol Dos Santos Stand. ‘Not even him,’ put in someone else. ‘Even Courtney’s happy that he’s not captain any more.’

  Andy Caddick, the England fast bowler, said this week that Brian Lara is not God; Caddick clearly had not taken a straw poll at the Oval. If Brian Lara is not God, he is at least the Pope of Queen’s Park. Certainly he is infallible in Trinidad.

  Not even when Lara dropped an ankle-high catch with Alec Stewart on 40 did the Trinidadians at the Oval bat an eyelid. A sudden shout went up as the ball carried to Lara and was followed by an even quicker sigh as it tumbled out of the captain’s hands. Total silence fell with it, but only for the second or two before a Rastaman on the cycle track under the scoreboard spoke. ‘Nobody coulda caught that,’ he declared, glaring around him, daring anyone to disagree. Intimidation was unnecessary. No one had even heard him. Everyone was immersed in a personal struggle to transform a dropped catch at a critical point into something positive, if not a sign of genius.

  The Rastaman found himself on safer ground a few minutes later when, with Stewart on 45, Carl Hooper dived in front of Lara at first slip, only to drop the catch. ‘Damned Guyanese,’ said the Rasta, smiling broadly. For the first time an Oval crowd was pleased to see a mistake made: it wasn’t the home-town hero.

  Anything Lara did was spectacular. Strategies that seemed fairly straightforward were heralded as brilliant. In the over before tea he brought Carl Hooper on to try a change from pace, a tactic my Form 3 physics teacher had suggested to our class captain in our inter-house league in 1973. Graham Thorpe obliged by slashing at a ball and was easily caught behind. A sportswriter (need I say a Trinidadian one?) near me in the press box shook his head in amazement. ‘That’, the writer pronounced breathlessly, ‘is genius captaincy.’

  After two sessions of fruitless search for anti-Lara sentiment, I decided to be subversive. If I could not find a volunteer, I would entrap someone. I leaned against a pillar in a stand and struck up an ostensibly casual conversation with a man wearing a ‘Brian Lara 375’ T-shirt. ‘He’s p
ut on a bit of weight, hasn’t he?’ I asked. The man looked me up and down with a sneer. ‘Not’, he said, ‘as much as you.’ He walked off.

  Undaunted, I went to the merchandise booth and waited for someone to buy a Brian Lara cap. A pretty girl picked one up, looked at it, put it back down. ‘Brian’s got a bit chubby, huh?’ I asked. (His face is no longer boyishly slim, and a detractor, if there were such a thing in Trinidad, would say he may be thickening slightly at the waist.)

  The girl studied him closely. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he’s captain now. He must have to go to those cocktail parties and dinners and things. He’s got to put on a little weight. He’s still gorgeous.’

  In the middle, Adam Hollioake got himself run out to the bowling of Jimmy Adams. Brilliant captaincy

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  Shane Warne is a characteristically extroverted Australian who some judges reckon to be the finest wrist-spinner in the history of the game. During the 1999 World Cup he suffered a rare loss of form. Like Frank Keating, I was also at Lord’s when a humble Zimbabwe side took him to the cleaners. Keating’s appreciation was written on the eve of the semi-final. Happily, his apprehensions were unfounded. Warne bowled beautifully in this match and in the final against Pakistan, and will ennoble our game for some time yet.

  FRANK KEATING

  Final Fling for the Fizzer (1999)

  Tell you something I have seriously missed this World Cup summer so far: that twangy and combative Oz morale-booster ‘Bowled Warney!’ or the alternative ‘Great one, Shaney!’ boldly enunciated by the gnarled and gauntleted old bush-whacker Ian Healy four or five times an over when the true-great leg-spinner was zipping and zapping through his six-pack of fizzing dangers and delights.

  Differently good as he is, Australia’s one-day wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist has none of Healy’s unsettling partner-in-crime vociferousness. Or perhaps the truth is that Warne’s once wondrous bowling has lost all its viperish menace and is nothing much to write home about any more, let alone hail and hosanna so noisily from behind the stumps.