Devon Malcolm (1998) — You Guys Are History! London: CollinsWillow

The Oval, 1994. South African seam bowler Fanie de Villiers bowls a bouncer to England’s Devon Malcolm – supposedly payback for Malcolm earlier doing the same to team-mate Jonty Rhodes and sending him to hospital – and hits him on the head, causing a piece of his batting helmet to be sent flying.

Malcolm, furious, tells the surrounding fielders, ‘You guys are history!’ before producing one of the best bowling performances of all time – 9-57 – to dismiss South Africa cheaply and help win England the match.

That’s the legend anyway, and though some contemporary accounts apparently cast doubt over whether Malcolm ever used those words, the man himself says that he did – and it makes for a better story, regardless.

Malcolm was a fast bowler in an era when England didn’t have many of them as their disposal. My earliest memories of his bowling are during the Oval Test the previous year, helping England towards a consolation victory over a dominant Australian team who had otherwise feasted on a diet of interchangeable medium-fast bowling.

It was Malcolm’s first Test of the summer. Ian Chappell, in a piece for Wisden entitled ‘Why We Beat the Poms’, later wrote: ‘During the summer of 1993 I constantly heard the lament, “What is wrong with English cricket?” In part, the answer is the inability of people directing the English game to recognise the good that there is. For instance, one of the more common moans was “Where are all the England fast bowlers?” Answer: Devon Malcolm was playing for Derbyshire for the first five Tests.’

Seven other seamers – Andy Caddick, Chris Lewis, Phil DeFreitas, Neil Foster, Martin McCague, Mark Ilott and Martin Bicknell – had played in those earlier matches, with four making their debuts in the series and Foster returning after a four-year absence for one Test before retiring shortly afterwards.

The nadir was arguably the fourth Test at Headingley, a performance which prompted the resignation of Graham Gooch as captain, during which England’s all-seam attack was pummelled for 652/4 declared on the way to an innings defeat.

Steve Waugh, who scored 157* in that match, noted in his autobiography that ‘Australia, as a team, breathed a sigh of relief whenever a steady medium-pacer was picked in front of [Malcolm]’. Indeed, that happened again prior to his miraculous 9-57, with Malcolm playing only the first Test of the 1994 summer against New Zealand before being dropped for the left-armer Paul Taylor and only returning again at The Oval.

Malcolm had bowled indifferently against New Zealand, and the general feeling was that he was as likely to do that as produce a match-winning performance. The fact that he was a genuine number 11 with the bat and susceptible to errors in the field meant that, as his sometime tail-end colleague Phil Tufnell also found, bad days with the ball left him more vulnerable than most.

But England were often as unsure about their other bowlers as they were about Malcolm, which left the whole attack in an almost constant state of flux. As he admits here, Malcolm operated best alongside steady, consistent seamers like Angus Fraser, with whom he combined successfully – in tandem with Gladstone Small and David Capel – on his first tour, to the West Indies, in 1990. A potential wildcard like Malcolm was a risk when the other bowlers were debutants, or unproven, or in and out of the side; and even more so if the batsmen had failed to post a decent total.

The infamous confrontation with Ray Illingworth at the end of the 1995/6 tour to South Africa is a case in point. After proving expensive and failing to break a crucial final wicket stand between David Richardson and Paul Adams in the fifth and deciding Test in Cape Town, Illingworth blamed Malcolm for England’s eventual defeat in the match, and series. But – Dominic Cork aside – the bowlers had been rotated throughout the series, leaving Malcolm short of match fitness, while the batting line-up, reduced to five specialists with Jack Russell at six, posted sub-160 totals in both innings.

Illingworth’s deteriorating relationship with Malcolm on that tour, following an unsuccessful and misguided attempt to get coach Peter Lever to change a 32-year-old fast bowler’s action, exploded in that instant, and the subsequent fallout in the press rumbled on throughout 1996. Illingworth faded into the background before leaving his post relatively quietly, while Malcolm was omitted from the team as a new range of fast-medium bowlers were selected in his stead.

He admits here some regret at allowing an interviewer from the Daily Express to infer that race was a factor in his coach’s poor treatment of him. In this respect he differentiates Illingworth’s behaviour from a shameful 1995 article by Robert Henderson in Wisden Cricket Monthly entitled ‘Is It In The Blood?’ in which it was suggested, in Malcolm’s words, that ‘as a matter of biology, non-white cricketers were incapable of giving full commitment to England’, over which Malcolm sued for libel and settled out of court.

While Illingworth’s often tactless and insensitive comments while chairman seemed to extend to all of his players, and there is no suggestion that racist language was ever used toward Malcolm, contemporary accounts of the South Africa tour tend to back up his account of unfair treatment and, in most cases, it proved to be the moment when the players lost respect for Illingworth as coach. (1)

Through a modern lens it seems without doubt that there were extra obstacles, assumptions and unfairnesses for Malcolm to negotiate during his England career. (2) In the final chapter of You Guys Are History! he writes, while acknowledging moments of underperformance and a patchy overall record, of how comments from his first captain Gooch – that his ‘radar had gone’ or, as Gooch wrote in his autobiography, that he would ask Malcolm to do the opposite of what he wanted to get the desired result – were patronising and created a stereotype that proved difficult to shake.

Malcolm returned briefly for a low-key swansong against Australia in 1997 and continued to bowl quickly at county level until the age of 40 but retired as an underused and underappreciated asset at international level. Ultimately, England once again failed to harness the talent at their disposal, their coaches stymied by narrow-minded ‘just bowl line and length’ thinking (3) rather than considering how best to support a player with rare match-winning qualities.

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Notes:

(1) One of the few to keep a more neutral line was captain Mike Atherton, no doubt keen to avoid excessive criticism of Illingworth in his autobiography when their relationship had been such a focus of the media at the time. Malcolm, in turn, is one of the few 90s players to say that he thought Alec Stewart a better choice as captain in 1993.

(2) The fact that an article like Henderson’s could ever have been allowed to be published being one of them.

(3) While Peter Lever’s interjections were perhaps the most famous, Malcolm is equally uncomplimentary about predecessor Geoff Arnold, noting that on the 1994/5 Ashes tour he ‘kept pulling out tapes of Craig McDermott, who took 32 wickets … in the series, and telling me, “This is how we should be bowling.”’

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