Marshall arts

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.