The last telephone call from Michael Marshall was in midsummer. Should we sit together at the half-century dinner of the cricket-writers’ club at Lord’s? Sorry, I hadn’t booked. I wish I had. Sir Michael died this month at 76. For a devout Yorkshireman, I suppose having to be Conservative MP for Arundel for 32 years had compensations for pastoral cricketing even if the castle’s fabled private ground was a world away from Sheffield’s Bramall Lane where Marshall, as he said, ‘learned the lore of the game’ long before his father sent him south to Bradfield.
Michael was fully entitled to be an eminence of our cricket-writers’ club, not only for his books and journalism but in his early business career representing Sheffield steel in Calcutta and Bombay when he was a regular cricket commentator for All India Radio.
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