It’s easily done. You’re just settling down for a cosy afternoon in front of the cricket when you accidentally sit down on the remote control and all of a sudden you find yourself tuned into the Sci-Fi Channel.
Watching an England day-nighter from behind the sofa must be a relatively novel experience, but there must have been more than one viewer who dived for cover during the ODI at Edgbaston when one of the umpires appeared to have turned into Dan Dare, or Darth Vader.
Would he, on receipt of an appeal for leg before wicket, remove the batsman via the traditional method of a raised finger? Or despatch him into the ether with a deadly blast from his death-ray machine? Leaving just a helmet lying in the crease on top of a smoking pile of dust, and, by definition, no prospect of the poor sap calling for a review.
It took me a while to work out what the bizarre contraption attached to Bruce Oxenford’s left arm reminded me of. But when I realised that Bruce had clearly got the inspiration for his gadget from an extractor fan in a downstairs lavatory, all thoughts of aliens from outer space arriving to conquer the Earthlings, or restore order after Brexit, immediately gave way to a fit of the giggles.
Another clue to the fact that this peculiar business was something other than an inter-galactic invasion, was the fact that the umpire in question hails from Australia. Which has become, in a short space of a time, a country that has gone from a land of daredevil surfers and crocodile hunters, to feeble-minded state controlled zombies who live in fear of being sent to a house of correction if they dare to venture out into the sunshine without first applying 14 layers of factor 60, or attempt to cross a road before the little red man has turned green.
You can’t even attend a cricket match until an electronic big screen video has delivered a lecture on how to park your posterior in a tip-up seat without risking instant death, so it may well be that this protective shield is not Oxenford’s own idea at all, but the umpire becoming yet another brainwashed victim of the Australian government’s hysterical obsession with Health and Safety.
However, neither can we overlook the possibility that this is another case of someone labouring under the misapprehension that the game is crying out for umpires to abandon the long held belief that the best officials are the ones you scarcely notice, and become what’s known as a ‘character’.
The most obvious example of this is the New Zealander, Billy Bowden, who somehow managed to convince himself – before the ICC finally twigged that he wasn’t very good and kicked him off the elite panel – that the majority of the television cameras deployed for the match in question were there to focus on him, rather than the players.
Hence the ridiculous signals for boundaries, sixes in particular, and a choreographed routine more closely related to conducting the Last Night Of the Proms than officiating at a Test match for summoning the mid-session drinks.
And as for that bent raised finger being attributed to arthritis, it would be easier to swallow if this particular strain of arthritis was not exclusively confined to umpires from New Zealand while attempting to give a batsman out.
Another umpire who spent most of his international career trying to fight off a voice in his ear telling him that the game was bigger than he was – and failing – was Darrell Hair. He’s penned two books, whose titles – The Decision Maker and In The Best Interests Of The Game – don’t immediately strike you as the work of a man with a diminished sense of his own importance.
As for Bowden, I once came across him signing autographs after a day’s play at Headingley, and if he was trying not to look too pleased with himself, he wasn’t making a very good job of it.
Strange how this kind of thing has come about. Umpires used to be invisible, more or less, apart, of course, from Dickie Bird, and no-one ever accused Dickie of behaving eccentrically for the purpose of cultivating an image. Ask any player of that era to sum him up in one word, and ‘bonkers’ would win it by a landslide.
Dickie was the first superstar umpire, whose entire career was spent worrying. The approach of a dark cloud, and the prospect of a bad light decision, would be the catalyst for an outbreak of nervous facial tics, and bodily gyrations normally confined to someone whose underpants have recently been invaded by a colony of ants. Between deliveries, his eyes were constantly fixed on the sky, fearing the worst, and muttering: “Please God, don’t let it rain. Send it to the Oval, but not here.”
Which is why one of my favourite Dickie stories involves a day at Headingley in 1988, when, going through his usual routine of looking nervously up at the clouds, the water on this occasion came gushing up his trouser leg.
It transpired that a pipe had burst, leaving an area of turf directly on Curtly Ambrose’s run-up bubbling like a jacuzzi in a health club. So when Dickie led the players off under a bright blue sky, the heckling had an extra oomph to it. “You again Bird! What is it this time? Sunshine stopped play? To which Dickie shouted back, “don’t blame me, it’s not my fault, I’m not a plumber!’”
There were other characters, of course. Sam Cook was famous for his hair trigger, the finger usually going up somewhere between “Ow” and “zat?” And dear old Arthur Jepson, responding to an inquiry about the light when the 1971 Gillette Cup semi-final at Old Trafford ran into the Nine o’clock News. “You can see the moon, how far do you want to see?”
There were batsmen around in those days, like Viv Richards and Clive Lloyd, who were equally capable of decapitating someone with a straight drive, but umpires didn’t feel the need to dress up like El Cid. It will be medieval chain mail next, or double sprung mattresses strapped around the abdomen.
I’m just waiting for batsmen to adopt one of Oxenford’s gadgets, and employ them as arm guards.
In which case, at this time of year, when a straight drive turns into a game of ping pong, you won’t know whether you’re tuned into the cricket or the Centre Court at Wimbledon.
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, Friday July 1 2016
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