Life and Career
Marks was educated at Blundell's School and Oxford University, for whom he played between 1975 and 1978 (alongside Imran Khan and Chris Tavaré, and opposite Peter Roebuck of Cambridge University, subsequently Marks' captain at Somerset). Marks captained Oxford University in 1976 and 1977.
Marks made his first-class debut in the 1975 English domestic season, and five years later made his ODI debut against the West Indies. His Test debut was in 1982 against Pakistan.
He went on to play six Test matches, but was an important member of the ODI squad for a number of years, appearing thirty four times and taking forty four wickets at a bowling average of 25.79. His haul of five for 20 for England against New Zealand in 1984 was, for some years, England's bowling return best in One Day Internationals; it remains the best one-day innings analysis by an England slow bowler, and Marks is the only England slow bowler ever to have taken two ODI five-wicket hauls (he also claimed five for 39 against Sri Lanka in 1983). Marks was the first England bowler of any description to achieve this feat (although seamers Darren Gough, Mark Ealham and Andrew Flintoff subsequently emulated it).
Marks had a distinguished first-class career between 1975 and 1989 for Somerset. He also played a season for Western Australia playing in the 1986-87 Sheffield Shield winning team. In 342 first-class matches he took 859 wickets at 33.28, and scored 12,419 runs at a batting average of 30.29.
As a cricketer he was popular and well-liked; Wisden editor, Matthew Engel, labeled him "a mild, nervy, self-deprecating farm boy with an Oxford degree and no enemies". This was an unusual distinction in the Somerset side of the 1980s, where three explosive personalities, Viv Richards, Joel Garner and Ian Botham, had a dispute with captain Peter Roebuck, which resulted in Somerset (under the influence from Roebuck and new club Secretary Tony Brown) opting not to renew Richards' and Garner's contracts in 1986, and Botham leaving the club in protest.
After retiring as a professional cricketer, he turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting, and is now a regular summariser on Test Match Special. He writes regularly about cricket and occasionally rugby union for The Observer newspaper.
He is currently Chairman of Cricket at Somerset.
Read more about this topic: Vic Marks
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The man of large and conspicuous public service in civil life must be content without the Presidency. Still more, the availability of a popular man in a doubtful State will secure him the prize in a close contest against the first statesman of the country whose State is safe.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)