Like the geyser in the bathroom, but a butler and protector too

Few umpires are known as well as the players are, and that’s as it should be. The great characters (Frank Chester, David Shepherd, Dicky Bird, Billy Bowden) are remembered. So too are the notorious (Douglas Sang Hue, Sambhu Pan, Lou Rowan, Steve Bucknor, Darrell Hair) for their occasional misdeeds. Yet, whatever their image from the consistently accurate to the comically inaccurate, umpires were doomed to unpopularity till the Decision Review System (DRS) reduced the mistakes.

Umpires are often recipients of the crowd’s ire. Riots have erupted over decisions perceived as being unfavourable to local teams. My earliest cricket memory is running out of the stadium in Bengaluru with my hand in my father’s after Australians Bill Lawry and John Gleeson had padded away the South Zone spinners to draw a match in 1969-70. Many thought the umpires allowed the batters to get away too often. Australians, chasing 200 lost their eighth wicket at 53.

Years later, Ashley Mallet revealed the secret. Gleeson, he said, had told each umpire, “if you give me out lbw I will wrap my bat around your head.”

Perils of umpiring

There’s no recorded case of an umpire walking around with a bat for a crown, but there’s worse. An umpire was stabbed to death this year, following a run-out decision in a local match in Visakhapatnam; another was killed for calling a no-ball in Cuttack.

There was a legendary umpire in Chennai who ran towards the boundary in a league match as the fielding team appealed, gave the batter out and jumped over the wall and into a bus. The same gentleman sometimes appeased the barrackers by giving them passes for internationals.

All umpires, even the best, make mistakes for one reason: they are human. But only if the decisions indicate incompetence or bias is there an issue.

Thoughts of umpires have been in my mind since the passing of Vikram Raju, 92, famous for giving last man Maninder Singh out leg before in the tied Test of Chennai in 1986. Maninder insisted he was not out. But with one raised finger, Vikram Raju raised the status of Indian umpiring.

As top umpire Simon Taufel, said years later, “We (umpires) think differently — the job demands it as we have to deal with the facts and not emotions.” The emotions were left to the thirty thousand of us in the stands. The two umpires (Dara Dotiwala was the other) were the only unemotional people in the cauldron.

That Vikram was never appointed for a Test match again tells us how much more profitable it would have been for him to compromise. Umpires in the subcontinent then were notorious for aiding the home team, causing Pakistan’s Imran Khan to appoint ‘neutral’ umpires later that decade.

Vikram was sharp, calm and in control, and had a subtle sense of humour that helped him cope with the demands of umpiring while holding down a job in Deccan Herald, my first employers too. We played together for the club where these qualities became obvious.

Hat stand, good luck charm…

Neville Cardus wrote the umpire “is like the geyser in the bathroom; we cannot do without it, yet we notice it only when it is out of order.” The umpire is also a hat stand for the bowler, a good luck charm (whenever the score reached 111 David Shepherd would hop on one leg for luck), a barber (Bird once gave Sunil Gavaskar a haircut when his hair kept falling over his eyes), a butler who takes the players off for meals, a weatherman who works out when it’s going to rain, a protector of the game and players, and occasionally, a “national treasure”, as former British Prime Minister David Cameron labelled Dicky Bird.

In his early days as umpire, S. Venkatraghavan, easily was among the best, berated a bowler if he made a frivolous appeal. The DRS has reduced mistakes, but it has also taken away the characters, the fabulous originals.

Vikram Raju believed that all players should undergo umpiring training. After all, even the great Don Bradman sat for umpiring exams following the Bodyline series. His biographer wrote, “he did not consider himself a complete cricketer until he had thoroughly understood the laws and their interpretations.” What was good enough for Bradman…