“Hopefully I win them over one day”
Redemption (Getty - Stu Forster)
It was an innings crafted with workmanlike brutality, forged in the hottest fires with the kind of steel only saved for the finest regal blades.
It was also an innings that left Australian tongues wagging while simultaneously wondering where this had been since that brash burly hitter debuted in Test cricket way back in 2014 against Pakistan in the UAE.
Test cricket is, inherently, a copycat game. Sides are constantly looking to emulate the points of difference of the top sides, finding those gamebreakers and diamonds in the rough that can propel you to a decade of dominance.
We saw it in the 1990s when Shane Warne made everyone want to find the next great legspinner.
We saw it with Adam Gilchrist and the advent of an attacking wicket keeper batsman.
And we saw it with the rise of all-rounders like Jacques Kallis and Andrew Flintoff, players capable of being picked as specialist batsmen or specialist bowlers, yet so elevated in their own stratosphere that they combined the best of both worlds.
Australia have been on the hunt for that great all-rounder ever since Flintoff brutalised them in the 2005 Ashes, sometimes shoehorning guys in that weren’t quite made for the occasion.
It saw Test debuts for the likes of Hilton Cartwright, Moises Henriques and even current Test coach Andrew McDonald, the selectors turning over every stone in search of that elusive unicorn they’d seen in the wild.
The idea of the all-rounder is easy to understand, the charm and lustre of a player capable of hitting a quick 40 and then turning around to bowl 10-15 overs, allowing your frontline bowlers invaluable rest, is a prototype found in video game create-a-player pages, maxing out all sliders.
Look at Test cricket today, the likes of Ben Stokes and Ravindra Jadeja are two of the more feared and valuable red ball cricketers for their versatility and ability to be picked for one discipline alone.
Stokes has 13 Test centuries and nearly 200 wickets, while Jadeja averages over 35 with the bat and under 25 with the ball.
And that brings us to Mitchell Marsh.
Marsh has packed a lot into an elongated 33 Test career to date, debuting back in 2014 in the heat of the Middle East. Scores of 27 and 3, coupled with 0 wickets from 24 overs over the Test, paint a picture of a miserable time as Pakistan romped to a 221 run victory.
Marsh would follow up with scores of 87 and 47 in his next Test, before hitting a couple of 40s in his home debut against India at Adelaide that summer. His raw power on show, but coupled with some patience and an understanding of the mental fortitude required to succeed at Test cricket. His 87 came at a blistering 75 strike rate, while his follow up 47 more crafted, lasting 130 balls.
While his bowling took a little longer to come around, taking four Tests to claim his first scalp (Shikhar Dhawan caught behind), Australia was excited at the prospect of a powerful young star anchoring the middle order, taking bowlers all over the park and chipping in with overs as required.
Prospect and potential are positives until they aren’t, and even the brighest stars only have so much time and rope before those words turn from beacons of light to a heavy albatross around the neck of the bearer, and what followed for Marsh after a promising initial foray into the fires of Test cricket was a series of unfortunate events and sporting disasters similar to those suffered by the Beaudelaire children (ok maybe melodramatic but I’m painting a picture here).
Marsh after breaking his hand punching a wall after a dismissal against Tasmania.
Separate ankle injuries in 2020 and 2022, the latter of which cost him the entire Australian summer, a fractured hand after punching a wall following a Sheffield Shield dismissal in 2019, an unsavoury on field incident with Kagiso Rabada that cost him 20% of his match fee in a 2018 Test vs. South Africa.
Injuries and other incidents aside, the pressure of being a Test cricketer, alleviating the burden of being the next great hope, was clearly weighing down on Marsh on the field.
Between his 87 against Pakistan in 2014 (his second Test) and his second Test 50 (53 against Sri Lanka in Colombo in August 2016) was a run of 24 innings at an average of 21.05, with only three scores above 40 (the first three innings).
17 Test matches for a return of 421 runs batting in the top six, and 27 wickets. Considering the consistent chances Marsh received to find that form and the struggles that ensued, it’s no wonder the Australian public began to grow sour with the idea that Marsh would ever be more than a “what if” debate to be had down at the pub.
Marsh, by all accounts, is one of the best teammates and members of the touring party, an absolute delight to be around, bringing constant positivity and a team first attitude. It was never a question of attitude with Marsh, but being nice only gets you so far.
Marsh’s two prior Test centuries, both in the home Ashes series of 2017-18 felt like they were destined to be nice moments to cherish when you looked back on his career, two punctuation marks among a sea of frustrating potential. Sharing the pitch with his brother Shaun in Sydney, both making hundreds in the same innings, is something for the grandkids.
Marsh has shown a great level of introspection and realism during his Test career. After his last Test, the 5th Test of the 2019 Ashes at The Oval, where he made 41 runs and took 7 wickets, including a 5/46 effort in the first innings, he was asked why he divided opinion in Australia.
Most of Australia hate me. There’s no doubt I’ve had a lot of opportunity at Test level and I haven’t quite nailed it. But hopefully they can respect me for the fact I keep coming back … I’ll keep trying and hopefully I’ll win them over one day.
Looking back on that press conference, it’s a tough watch to see a man who so clearly loves playing for his country grappling with what was effectively at the time the end of his Test career, with Cameron Green beginning to make a name for himself domestically and only a year off debuting in Tests as the next Australian all-rounder project.
Confronting your own mortality, even in something so benign as sport, is a hard thing to do, and Marsh handled it with more spirit and honesty than I can properly give him credit for.
What makes it even harder though, is that it’s all true. He had been given a run in the side. He hadn’t quite nailed it. Occasional flashes of sheer brilliance, a brutal 181 against an admittedly dour touring England side, a 5 wicket haul, his white ball international form so far removed from what he had produced at Test level.
It’s that journey to the bottom that makes his Headingley masterclass so much sweeter.
With Australia stumbling at 4-85, you’d be forgiven for setting an alarm and calling it an early night. With Mark Wood steaming in and a pitch providing more ghouls and demons than the first two combined, it was short money that Australia would wilt and limp to a total in the low 100s, and rely on their cartel of elite pacemen to drag them out of the hole, as they’ve done so many times before.
It’s the type of script that if it was in an M. Night Shyamalan film the audience would groan, the type of twist so painfully obvious and insincere you could see it coming a mile away. The trope of the downtrodden unlikely hero.
Drafted into the side thanks to an injury to Cameron Green (that’s the official line although it was pretty clear Green needed a break either way), Marsh strode to the crease and played the best innings I’ve ever seen him play in his entire career.
There was the trademark hitting that has made him a favourite in white ball cricket and one of the Big Bash League’s most feared showmen. But this Marsh innings was so great because of the notes we didn’t know he had.
There was a maturity that I’d never seen before in his batting. Sure, he’d played long innings before, but mature batting is more than patience and letting balls go. It’s about knowing when to attack, when to pull back, and not getting stuck in one gear.
The old Marsh, after clobbering the first one, would attempt to hit each ball to a different postcode, usually resulting in a frustrating “Bazballian” dismissal and a shake of the head.
But not this time. There was a sense of calm at the crease. Full blooded drives were followed by easy knock and runs. A Mark Wood bouncer dispatched for six encored by a textbook defensive shot. It was a cricketing one-man orchestra, all the notes meshing together perfectly, nothing out of place.
A run a ball 118. After an early jitter (thanks Joe Root), a largely chanceless composition of languid drives and thumping pulls. A century in a session, not done by an Australian in England since Stan McCabe in 1938.
There was a sense of house money about Marsh’s innings, a real freedom and clarity of thought. In his last Test innings, he was still the poster child, the hope at that barbaric all-rounder to mirror Flintoff. There was an underlying narrative of pressure and expectation, a desire to prove himself in the face of a nation baying for blood, to show he could still be the player that everyone else had long abandoned hope he’d ever become.
Nowadays, with Cam Green absorbing all the limelight and associated scrutiny, Marsh is left to the shadows, still a valued member of the touring party but without the expectation of a nation on his shoulders. In the face of adversity, with an England attack bowling as well as they’d been, a rabid Headingley crowd in tow, all the external noise around the Australian team swirling, Marsh played like it was a backyard on New Year’s Eve.
Where in the past we hoped this production would become routine, it feels different this time. No one is expecting anything anymore. It’s still the expectation that Green is the long term all-rounder this team so desperately wants, and given the amount of time and patience invested into Marsh’s Western Australian protege, you’d think Green will be back in the side relatively quickly.
So irrespective of how long this sojourn lasts, Marsh can ride off into the sunset on the back of one of the great Australian Ashes innings against all reasonable expectation, an innings that made an entire nation proud.
I’d say he’s won them over.
