This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Malcolm Marshall, arguably the greatest fast bowler in history, died 25 years ago this month. He was just 41, and colon cancer had eaten him from the inside out: he weighed only four stone when he died. His funeral in Barbados was broadcast across the Caribbean, and five West Indian captains were amongst the pallbearers. Cricket in the region has not been the same since.

Maco — everyone called him that — was an amalgam of his fellow bowlers’ best qualities. He had Andy Roberts’s guile, Michael Holding’s pace, Joel Garner’s relentlessness and Colin Croft’s aggression. At 5’10”, he was a sapling in the Brobdingnagian forests of his peers. But a man of his sublime talent didn’t need height.

He could make the ball rear from the deck with a cobra’s venom. Batsmen spoke in hushed tones of his vampire delivery, the one which nicked their necks on the way through to the keeper. The Essex tailenders Ray East and David Acfield used to carry Maco’s bags in the hope that he would go easy on them out in the middle.

Most famously, he broke Mike Gatting’s nose with a bouncer so vicious that fragments of bone were found embedded in the ball’s seam.

But Maco was far from being simply a one-dimensional destroyer. He could vary his pace when needed, he was a master of swing and cut both in and out, and unlike many fast bowlers he preferred to bowl with the old cherry rather than the new. The most intelligent of cricketers, he was always thinking, probing, testing, challenging. Wasim Akram, no slouch himself, said that Maco needed only two deliveries to work out a batsman’s weakness.

A man for all seasons and surfaces, Maco was equally at home on Australian trampolines, in damp English summers, and on pancake-flat Indian roads. He has the best average of the 84 men who have taken more than 200 Test wickets, and his 134 scalps in Hampshire’s 1982 season will almost certainly remain a record forever. “We’re playing cricket on earth,” said his teammate Tim Tremlett, “and he’s buggering about in the universe.”

As seven first-class centuries attest, Maco was also a very decent batsman. England fans of a certain vintage will recall him, broken thumb and all, hitting Paul Allott one-handed for four at Headingley in 1984. Less well remembered is that he was batting purely to help Larry Gomes reach a century, which Gomes duly did: for Maco was the ultimate team man, always invested in the power of the collective and as happy for others’ achievements as for his own.

He was generous with his time and expertise to teammates and opponents alike, for cricket knowledge and love were too precious to be hoarded. “He never wasted cricket talk,” said his Hampshire captain and great friend Mark Nicholas. “He channelled it. Either he benefitted or someone benefitted from him.” Dennis Lillee taught Maco how to bowl the leg-cutter; Maco in turn taught Imran Khan.

This love for the game was underpinned by strong principles. He turned down a $1m offer to tour apartheid South Africa (a refusal which prompted Ali Bacher, who’d made the offer, to call him “a very good cricketer but a foolish young man”): but he was also honest enough to admit he’d been tempted by the sheer size of the sum in question.

Maco’s implacability on the pitch was matched by his conviviality in the bar afterwards with his trademark brandy and Cokes. He really disliked only one player, India’s Dilip Vengsarkar, because of his excessively histrionic appealing. In the Marshall canon there were few transgressions graver than being unsporting like this: one played hard but fair, or one did not play at all.

Nicholas called him:

a man of joy and delight in all he did. The endless chatter, that laughter with his head thrown skywards, those dancing happy eyes and that welcoming ripper of a smile. And the unbridled enthusiasm for a determined march on all the challenges of life. Didn’t matter what they were, simple things even such as a round of golf, a hand of backgammon, a night on the town — all met with relish and hope.

Alan Marion, who kept wicket to a young Maco on the Melbourne club circuit, remembers him above all as “just one hell of a nice bloke”. It’s quite something to be both the most feared fast bowler and the most loved player in the world, but that was Maco: quite something indeed.

The story which perhaps best sums up his beguiling mix of skill, competitiveness and good humour is this. He once turned out for a village team as a favour to a mate. Whenever a Test cricketer does this, two things are certain: he will play well within himself so as not to embarrass others, and there will be an opponent who fancies himself shredder of reputations. Inevitably, both came to pass here.

Maco was bowling military medium off three strides. A young batsman swaggered to the wicket, cover drove his first delivery for four, and eyeballed Maco. Maco silently raised an eyebrow. Second ball, another four. Again Maco said nothing. The third ball, still off only three strides, came so fast that the batsman saw nothing but a vague red blur as it passed his off stump. Maco walked down the pitch and smiled.

“I think that now you and I … we have an understanding.”