Rod Marsh defied the doubters to define a golden generation of Australian cricket.
Rubbishing the theory that the best wicketkeepers go unnoticed, Marsh made an infamously conspicuous start to what became a groundbreaking career in Test cricket.
In his debut Test of 1970, as Brisbane fans howled at the exclusion of local gloveman John Maclean, Marsh made three critical errors — dropping catches from English batsmen John Edrich, Keith Fletcher, and Basil D'Oliveira.
When the series moved to Marsh's hometown, and the boos subsided, teammate Terry Jenner quipped, "He won't miss a catch in Perth. And even if he does, you won't read about it in the papers here".
As if on cue, Marsh shelled a chance from Geoffrey Boycott.
Perth newsmen might have looked away, but journalists from the eastern states were savage. They dubbed Marsh "Iron Gloves".
Few Australian cricketers since have faced such ugly and sustained ridicule at the beginning of their Test careers. "I felt like jumping the fence and taking some positive action in defence of my honour," Marsh later wrote.
Marsh, whose death at 74 on March 4 followed a heart attack a week earlier in Bundaberg where he was to attend a charity event, has rarely since those fledgling days as a Test cricketer needed to offer a word of self-defence. There is barely a cricket-loving city in the world where fans would not rush forward for the honour of buying him a drink.
Australian cricket has had tidier glovemen. Its ranks of great keepers now include more accomplished batters. But none possessed Marsh's macho aura, nor personified such a wildly entertaining and influential generation of cricket as had Australia's bear-like custodian of the 1970s and '80s.
It was not inappropriate that in his final hours Marsh phoned an old cricket mate to say he couldn't wait to meet up and share a beer. Now hundreds of teammates and opponents, thousands of Marsh's coaching proteges and millions of fans raise a glass to an icon of the summer game.
'I floated off the WACA'
Rodney William Marsh was born on November 4, 1947, in Armadale, south-east of Perth. He was the younger son of Barbara and Ken, the latter an enthusiastic bush cricketer and keen gardener whose demand that young Rodney preserve the more precious plants in the Marsh backyard led to the development of a world-famous sweep shot.
Early motivation came from Marsh's failure to gain selection as a bottom-age player in the Western Australian schoolboys squad in which brother Graham had been a star. At the age of 12, Rodney was picked in West Perth's 4th XI, a boy among men.
State schoolboys selectors did not ignore Marsh next time, installing him as West Australian captain in the same carnival that announced the arrivals of his future Test teammates Greg Chappell and Bob Massie.
Still, Marsh's rise to the Australian keeping job was extraordinary. In 1967-68 he had to leave West Perth, where state keeper Gordon Becker relegated Marsh to batting duties only.
Moving to the University club, Marsh came under the cricketing influence of John Inverarity and Jock Irvine, also commencing the tertiary studies in teaching that would foreshadow a long coaching career.
Western Australian Colts selection that season was followed by his first-class debut a year later, but even in Perth, there were no great raps on Marsh's glovework.
Fortunately his batting brooked no arguments. Playing as a specialist batsman in a stunning debut for Western Australia against the 1968-69 West Indians, he made 104 against the likes of Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith and Garfield Sobers. "I floated off the WACA", Marsh later wrote.
At the end of that summer, Becker retired and Marsh won full-time keeping duties for his state but looked no further afield. For the national job, Brian Taber and Maclean had far more backers in the media.
But in the blink of an eye, Marsh was a 23-year-old Test cricketer with the weight of the country on his shoulders.
'Seismic disturbances in the west'
If his swagger was innate, Marsh's resilience was perhaps the by-product of his tough initiation into Test ranks.
Not that he would have put it that way himself. In the fifth Test of his debut Ashes series, skipper Bill Lawry declared Australia's first innings with Marsh stranded on 92 — equal with Don Tallon for the highest Test score by an Australian keeper.
After the pasting he'd copped himself in the months previous, Marsh would have been excused for a bitter aside or two. Yet when the press asked for a reaction, Marsh revealed the pragmatic streak that made him such a valued lieutenant to his future captains, complaining only that Lawry should have declared much earlier. Sure enough, the game petered out into a draw.
Yet the crowds didn't stop jeering Marsh. In January of 1972, when he walked out to bat for Australia against the Rest of the World XI at the SCG, he was booed all the way from the pavilion to the crease as an expression of anger at the selectors' neglect of local hero Taber.
Sydneysiders saw a gum-chewing, heavy-legged battler whose unbuttoned shirt and dumpy physique confirmed the cliche of Western Australian cricketers as an inferior breed. How could this shaggy yokel be heir to the gloves of the unobtrusive Bert Oldfield and graceful Don Tallon?
Even teammate Paul Sheahan would later joke about Marsh's 95-kilogram frame of those days: "Visions of his leaping around behind the stumps raised fears of seismic disturbances in the west of the continent."
But after soaking in the booing that day at the SCG, Marsh dug in, crafting an undefeated 77. Soon he shed 13 kilograms of the roly-poly figure that dismayed his critics. And the following summer, against Intikhab Alam's Pakistanis, he got his Test century — 118 at nearly a run a ball in Adelaide.
Frank Tyson described it as "a characteristically rumbustious innings, replete with savage pulls and crunching drives of tremendous forearm strength".
Twelve years later, his doubters long silenced, Marsh retired from international cricket with numerous records, critical acclaim and the unqualified respect of his peers. His tally of 355 Test dismissals was the landmark his successors strove towards. Jack Pollard crowned Marsh the most popular Australian cricketer of his generation.
Later, Marsh would even make a tidy profit from his early-career ordeal, titling one of his popular books The Gloves of Irony.
'Never give a sucker an even break'
Unfairly, Marsh's keeping was often compared to that of his fastidious English contemporary Alan Knott, an anally retentive fitness freak who rose at 6am, took honey in his tea, changed his boots every session and performed callisthenic stretching routines between deliveries.
But trying to imagine Knott imposing himself on a contest like Marsh with Lillee and Thomson flanking him is like picturing a Hell's Angels biker with a bank teller in the side car. Marsh's idea of sport science was a cold beer in one hand, a dart in the other and a giant ice pack for his arthritic knee.
Numerous classic photographs attest to the gauntlet he ran. In one, all bar Marsh's left index finger are bandaged, but he presents them with the prideful grin of a father showing off a newborn. Just as numerous are the images of Marsh at full stretch, in horizontal flight, reeling in another diving catch; such was Australia's abundance of fast bowling talent, only 12 of his Test dismissals were stumpings.
Rustic, unkempt, sometimes downright ugly in his methods, Marsh was nevertheless a wicketkeeping innovator.
His legacy can be seen in the kitbag of any modern keeper: Marsh is credited as the originator of cut-off leg guards for keeping, whereas earlier generations had been satisfied with cumbersome batting pads.
Like his predecessor Wally Grout, Marsh adopted a simple credo: "Never give a sucker an even break". But he resented the 'Ugly Australians' tag his generation earned, arguing that if Bob Willis described the 1982-83 Ashes as the most sportsmanlike series he'd played in, and Kiwi skipper Glenn Turner likened the following Australian summer to a tour of Vietnam, the truth was surely somewhere in the middle.
'I couldn't believe he was a normal man'
Uniquely among keepers of his day, Marsh could genuinely intimidate with the bat, throwing every part of his well-upholstered frame into blizzards of attacking strokes.
Nolan Clarke, the fearless Barbadian batsman, once said his only moment of apprehension on a cricket field came when he stood at short leg as Marsh batted: "I was standing there and I see the man's hands and the man's wrists, and I couldn't believe he was a normal man. I wanted to move."
More famously, Imran Khan claimed that it was Marsh's approval that made him feel like "an authentic fast bowler". In the Melbourne Test of 1976 — the pre-helmet days — Imran beat Marsh for pace with a bouncer that struck the nuggety Australian on the forehead. The bowler beamed with pride as Marsh shrugged off the blow and asked "Where did you get that extra yard of pace from?".
In the days before it was a given that keepers should contribute substantially with the bat, Marsh compiled an unprecedented three Test centuries. Four times he fell in the 90s, batting for team rather than individual causes.
Although he believed the ball was there to be hit, he was no slogger. A solid defensive technique meant Marsh could adapt to any game scenario. If he underachieved in a statistical sense, he left a far greater impression on fans than players with better numbers.
And his keeping rarely suffered for success with the bat: a century and 10 catches against South Australia in 1976-77 was also unprecedented.
The following summer Marsh became a trailblazer in a more divisive sense, joining Kerry Packer's World Series breakaway and ensuring his generation were the first Australian cricketers of the postwar era to receive salaries commensurate with their commercial value to the game.
At the top of his field at that point, Marsh had a compelling point of comparison in the form of his brother Graham's far superior earnings as a gifted though middling professional golfer. Plenty resented it when he was among the first Australians to write "professional cricketer" on their customs forms, but even a traditionalist like John Arlott would conclude of Marsh: "He comes out of a cataclysmic event in cricket history with honest credit."
Indeed, Marsh lit up with joy describing the sight of fans streaming into the SCG for the inaugural day-night match of 1979, after Packer had issued an order for the venue's gates to be flung open. Marsh was a man of the people.
'Caught Marsh, Bowled Lillee'
Even as his career was in progress, Marsh occupied a spot on Australian cricket's Mount Rushmore. With Dennis Lillee, Ian and Greg Chappell, he formed what the Press called 'The Gang of Four', as virile and influential a quartet of cricketers as Australian has produced. Between 1972 and 1980, only Clive Lloyd's great West Indian sides could match their mixture of brawn, brains and sheer brilliance.
With Ian Chappell's retirement, for close to half a decade they became the 'Big Three', departing the game in one devastating hit after the 1983-84 international summer. The combined loss left a hole that took Australian cricket years to fill.
Marsh was arguably the hardest to replace: five keeping successors were discarded before Ian Healy found his feet.
Of course, it was his partnership with Lillee that stands central to the mythology of Australian cricket of the postwar era. 'Caught Marsh, Bowled Lillee' became one of life's great certainties.
Marsh and Lillee's friendship began in the mid-1960s, enduring through the highs of their Ashes triumphs, the low of the 1981 Headingley betting scandal, and their fruitful decades as coaches. With Inverarity, they were instrumental to Western Australia's emergence as the dominant force in Sheffield Shield cricket, making the WACA hostile territory to visitors.
All but 20 overs' worth of Lillee's Test deliveries were bowled with Marsh behind the stumps.
The great fast bowler finished with 355 scalps too, 95 of them snaffled by the keeper.
Marsh once explained their symbiosis as bordering on telepathic.
In 1988, work was completed on the WACA's Lillee Marsh Stand, whose function centre has for decades hosted the sportsman's nights at which grown adults became starstruck children again in the presence of the two greats.
'Marsh splashes down'
Once the 'Iron Gloves' episode was over, Marsh picked up a typically Australian nickname: "Bacchus" was not for the link between Marsh's infamous gluttony and the Greek God of wine and food, but for Bacchus Marsh, the Victorian country town with which the cricketer had no association whatsoever.
In developing his drinking prowess, Marsh had inherited a credo from father Ken: "Never trust a man who doesn't drink." Marsh's extreme trustworthiness was implied by an infamous flight to Heathrow in 1983, on which he broke Doug Walters' 44-can beer-drinking record.
Some accounts of the aftermath had Marsh being wheeled through customs on a baggage trolley. 'Marsh splashes down', said a London tabloid headline.
To the Australian team culture Marsh contributed a more lasting legacy — the team song, 'Under the Southern Cross'. Opinions vary as to whether it was first performed after the stirring victory at the Oval in 1972 or during the 1974-75 home Ashes, but there is no doubt it was Marsh leading the singing, standing above his teammates like a conductor.
The only major playing honour that eluded him was the Test captaincy, which in the brief window it was available went instead to fellow West Australian Kim Hughes, who also held the state leadership Marsh felt was his right. Marsh's displeasure was so unfiltered as to undermine Hughes.
There, another summary of Marsh by Paul Sheahan seems apt: "The archetypal Australian: strong, disrespectful of authority, yet fiercely loyal to those he admired." They all made up in the end.
'The most important partnership'
Ironically, when Cricket Australia (then the ACB) created the AIS cricket academy in 1987 to revive the county's fortunes, each of the Big 3 was initially ignored for its figurehead role. Four years later — Marsh had spent the intervening years as a TV commentator — common sense prevailed and Marsh was installed as director with such raging success.
The academy became a conveyor belt of Australians stars of the following generation. Inevitably, out of a crisis period of its own, England tried to replicate that success by poaching Marsh and his straight-talking ways. His work for the ECB from 2001 went some way towards England's 2005 Ashes triumph.
Back in Australia, Marsh did consultancy work before accepting the poisoned chalice that is the chairmanship of Australia's Test selection panel. A two-year tenure was long enough in the cross-hairs of armchair experts.
In 1969, Rod Marsh married sport-loving PE teacher Roslyn, with whom he shared what he called the most important partnership of his life. They had sons Daniel, a Shield-winning cricketer, Paul, now CEO of the AFL Players' Association, and Jamie, who survive him.
In that most Australian way, Ian Chappell once summarised the man by saying "I would like to have Rodney Marsh next to me in the trenches", but it took an Englishman, Frank Tyson, to set his statement straight: "They would probably be in the first wave over the top."
