Three cricket characters exit the stage

Ashton, Marsh and Collins all made a mark

Norm Ashton was a prolific historian and academic, red wine lover, cricket giant, football fan and fecund provider of talent to the University Cricket Club. He died in Adelaide last week, aged 86, after a long, varied and fulfilling life.

Head of Classics and Ancient History at UWA, where he studied the history of significant Greek island Castellorizo and the coins of Sifnos, and convinced sceptical teenagers of the value of examining the past to better know the future, Norm was my first-year tutor.

He won over our small Ancient History 100 class early by uncorking a fruity red to aid discussion and later, made it clear to me without ever saying it directly, that my degree prospects would not be harmed by doing well on the field for UCC where he was president.

That was the same year that he helped set up Lord’s Taverners in WA, the long-running cricket charity, and took a leading role in the national youth cricket council.

The council was the body that helped frame junior development across the country and, in those days, ran the national under-19 championships used to identify future Test talent.

Norm and his great mate Laurie Sawle, premiership team-mates at UCC, proved a powerful combination on the national stage.

Both visionaries about cricket’s direction, ‘Colonel’ Sawle was national selection chairman with a mantra to “identify talent and find a way to pick it” while Norm worked on the programs needed to produce that talent.

He had plenty of his own in cricket, football and hockey.

He was not able to break into the East Fremantle team that won the 1957 WAFL premiership but he soon had a remarkable season at UCC, taking 90 wickets at an average of 8.3 with his lively seamers, and completing the first leg of the unprecedented feat of winning a flag in every grade at the club.

Sport was his passion but history was his career. He combined the two with his epic Fremantle Football, which examined the origins of the sport in the port, and later, after moving east to become pro-chancellor at Adelaide University, the definitive and somewhat controversial book on Port Adelaide’s entry into the AFL.

He sired several groups of sons for Uni, called on his knowledge of the dead languages Latin and Ancient Greek to set up Namedroppers, a business most useful in providing exotic but accurate racehorse names, and was an outstanding raconteur and dinner guest.

Norm was a doer, mostly unruffled but strong-willed when roused, and great company.

I first encountered Shaun Marsh during a Taverner’s match organised by Norm Ashton against Wesley College where WA’s most promising young cricketer was in year 9.

He was as stylish then as he was more than a quarter of a century later after a career that took him from the heights of a century on Test debut and prolific form in the first edition of the Indian Premier League to the heartache of ever-present injuries, regular omissions from national and state teams and the scorn of much of the cricket-watching public.

Shaun played his final match on Wednesday, in the red of the Melbourne Renegades rather the orange of the Perth Scorchers, in the record-breaking 22nd consecutive season of his domestic career.

Possessed of a cover drive so exquisite that it was seemingly crafted by God, no cricketer on the planet could match Marsh at his most sublime.

I was fortunate to witness two of those peaks.

He was still a teenager when scored his maiden century for WA in Newcastle in early 2003, going from 93 to 105 in two balls after consecutive waist-high full tosses from Mark Waugh were dispatched into the tiny grandstand.

Steve Waugh, then the Test captain, was the first person to shake his hand and, after play, predicted that the youngster would out-shine his father Geoff as a Test cricketer. Waugh was right.

Twelve years later, and amid a career marked by extraordinary ups and downs, Marsh was back in the Test team and had a prediction of his own.

“I’ve got this very strong feeling that I am going to get a century,” Marsh whispered to me on the eve of the Test against the West Indies in Hobart. “I haven’t told anyone but I’ve never had this feeling before.”

Marsh made a lustrous 182 the next day, the highest of his six Test tons.

A week later, when he lost his place to the returning Usman Khawaja, it also became the highest score by any specialist Australian batsman before being dropped.

Marsh’s story is one of unexpected fulfillment.

He grew up with the overwhelming anticipation that he would follow his father into Test ranks, had almost come to terms with that dream not coming true and then exceeded his own and the world’s expectations with 141 in his first outing.

The rollercoaster got even more dizzy from that point.

He tried for 20 years to win a Sheffield Shield for WA and then, when it appeared that the drought would continue, he captained his state to triumph.

That would have been the perfect time to finish but he played on for another year or two, though without the same focus and intensity as before, but can now hang up his boots and enjoy cricket from the other side of the fence.

Firebrand real estate lawyer Paul Collins, who has been scrutinising the WACA’s redevelopment finances like no one else and is increasingly uncomfortable with what he has found, has just become the first director in the association’s 139-year history to have his membership suspended.

His crime? A clash with officials who claim that his prickly presence presents a “psycho-social hazard” to their mental well-being.

In what is an indictment of the WACA chair Avril Fahey’s inability to resolve an issue with a difficult director, the board recently voted 4-3 to suspend Collins for two months. One director abstained.

Collins believes his suspension is related to his exposure of the redevelopment fiasco in which no urinals were to be included in the $180 million project.

“I … encourage all members of the WACA to continue to ask questions about the design, costs and funding of the WACA ground redevelopment,” Collins said before indicating he was considering his legal options.

Four decades ago, when the WACA tried to ban recent Test captain Kim Hughes from club cricket over his links to the rebel South African series, it cost them half a million dollars in legal bills and didn’t work.

Let’s hope the current debacle is not equally disastrous.

A version of this piece appeared in the POST.