Plan B Forum

If you don't love cricket this may not mean much but . . .

I was pondering a post about Rodney Marsh who died yesterday. For those of us of a certain age he was Australian cricket, and a constant thorn in the side of England supporters. I think probably nothing gave him greater pleasure than a win over England, and he played in many. There was an infamous incident years ago when the then Aussie captain bowled (= pitched) the last ball of the game to New Zealand. NZ needed 6 off the last ball (= home run) to tie the game and Greg Chappell bowled it underarm along the ground to prevent a hit and thereby secure the Aussie win. Definitely unsporting and my abiding memory of that is Rodney Marsh (wicketkeeper = catcher) shaking his head and saying "No, mate don't do it" to Chappell. In other words he wanted no part of this unsporting decision. Very hard but very fair.

And while I was working out what to say - more or less what is above - I saw the breaking news that Shane Warne had just died at 52 also from a heart attack. If Marsh was the face of Aussie cricket for my generation, Warne was its exemplar for the next. 52 - way too young.

It seems trivial to be upset by this sort of thing when younger people on both sides are being killed in Ukraine.

It's not trivial, it's reasonable. Warney and Rod Marsh were icons of my sport, both will be missed greatly.

"Much loved Tasmanian batsman David Boon is said to have claimed the record of 52 beers consumed on Australia’s plane trip to London ahead of the 1989 Ashes series. Rod Marsh had originally broke Walters’ record, setting the bar at 51 cans, in an effort that saw the wicketkeeper carried off the plane. Legend has it that Boony was stuck on 49 cans until the captain was told to do a couple of loops to ensure the record was broken."

In any case, Warne got to bed Liz Hurley, (and several other beauties,) so he's always going to be a hero to me.

Shut your eyes and you can probably picture it. Shane Warne’s first ball in the Ashes, his choppy peroxide blond hair ruffling in the wind, the zinc cream smeared across his lips and the tip of his nose, his top button undone, his collar turned up, a flash of the gold chain bouncing around his neck. Seven steps, then he sweeps his arm over, sends the ball flying. It dips, hits the pitch, zips, spins the width of Mike Gatting, clips the off-stump. Bowled him! Warne roars, Gatting baffled, stares back down the pitch trying to figure out what’s just happened, umpire Dickie Bird tries to hide the ghost of a smile that’s crept across his face.


https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/ ... cy-cricket

Warne’s craft is the trickiest in cricket. And he mastered it to the point where he made it look easy. Writing that, another of those moments popped into my mind, the Big Bash match when he predicted live on air exactly how he was going to dismiss Brendon McCullum, then went and did it.