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The greatest fast bowler who ever drew breath?

OverratedSanity

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Only miserable old farts would consider Marshall and Trueman to be anywhere near as good as McGrath or Steyn. Equally good statistics in a way friendlier era for batsmen.
 

Lillian Thomson

Hall of Fame Member
Trueman bowled in an era of flat wickets and a good depth in batting. Marshall did bowl on some dangerous wickets in the West Indies in the mid-80's but did enough on flat wickets to prove he didn't need them.

Anyway besides that I've lost my first ever bet on CW having wagered that Imran Khan would be mentioned in the first 20 posts. :vampire:
 

Slifer

International Captain
Malcolm Marshall. Mcgrath, Imran and a few others not too far behind. Won't go into the stats as MM's needs no introduction. But this stuff about Mcgrath bowling in a more batsman friendly era gets overstated imo.

Mcgrath debuted I think in 1994 and played along side the likes of donald, Ambrose, wasim, etc. I assume that most here would say that the 90s was more bowler friendly. If that were the case, then why isn't Mcgraths stats noticeably better from that era?? Ok he was consistently great from the bowler friendly 90s to the flattened out wickets of 2000+ , as if all the wickets worldwide were all flattened out at the same time. The fact is, most of Mcgrath s great bowling contemporaries retired in the early 2000s Had most of them played on post 2000s and in their prime Im sure that at least one of them (more likely all) would've maintained their level of greatness ala Mcgrath.
 

smash84

The Tiger King
In terms of pure skill with the ball I haven't seen anyone be able to do what Wasim Akram could. A very nice 1.5 min clip of mcgrath, donald, waqar, and ambrose talking about Wasim


In terms of getting batsmen out and making life difficult for batsmen, hard to go past MM
 

Bijed

International Regular
Ditto Jimmy Anderson.
Although tbf Jimmy, wonderful as he is, isn't a realistic candidate for greatest fast bowler ever (and I don't think I've ever been proven wrong about Jimmy :ph34r:).

Anyway, I can't honestly decide between Marshall or McGrath and really the arguments for Steyn are pretty solid too.

I want to say McGrath just because of his ridiculous consistency, but I'm probably biased towards him over Marshall because I never saw Marshall but saw a fair bit of McGrath
 

JBMAC

State Captain
RED HILL...if you want a fair dinkum discussion on this subject you need to set the parameters of the word "greatest"..remember whats one mans meat is another mans poison.
 

akilana

International 12th Man
Dale Steyn. Every series there was an impactful spell which turned the test or the series in SA’s favour. Ridiculous SR in the most batsmen friendly era. KP of the bowling but more consistent
 

Chrish

International Debutant
All this discussion makes me just sad that I never got see Marshall live on TV. To me it's difficult to imagine someone to be as good as or even better than Mcgrath.
 

Red

The normal awards that everyone else has
I still SMH when I look at the 2005 Ashes scorecards, and look at the second test (Eng won by 2 runs) and the fourth test (Eng won by 3 wickets).

Guess who missed those 2 games thru injury?

If McGrath'd stayed fit, the 2005 Ashes would have (in all seriousness) been most likely a 3-0 result to Australia.

I don't even say this to troll English posters (that much). It's just literally how good McGrath was. When we had to function with an attack of Lee/a fading Dizzy/Kaspa and Tait, we suddenly became very vulnerable.
 

vcs

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Only miserable old farts would consider Marshall and Trueman to be anywhere near as good as McGrath or Steyn. Equally good statistics in a way friendlier era for batsmen.
Marshall has McGrath's average + Steyn's SR (well, close enough) and great WPM while bowling alongside many ATGs. Statistically, he stands out.
 

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