The Summer Field

145 Chapter Seventeen Umpiring and Scoring ‘Nothing was ever gained by questioning an umpire’s decision on or off the field.’ Garth Wheatley and Ray Parry, Cricket – Do it this way (1948) If the umpire gave you out, ‘don’t make a fuss’, even if you thought you weren’t out. So Wheatley and Parry urged, as good Oxford men. They, like cricket generally, trusted that fair play was fair overall, even if it did not feel like it as the umpire’s raised finger ended your day – and perhaps your place in the batting order, or the eleven. One more uncomfortable truth was that other cricketers, also in the name of fair play, would take a stand against umpires. Just as even the most ignorant or blind umpire, by raising his finger or not, might make the right decision half the time, so even a well-meaning umpire made some mistakes. One umpire from each team stood during All-England touring matches, and the All-England men took turns to umpire when not batting, including the captain, George Parr. That suggested the players wanted to keep the power to give themselves out; or, only players knew the laws well enough; or a paid umpire was an unwanted expense, or trouble. In July 1866 the Sheffield Independent described the umpire that came with the Notts Commercial club to beat Sheffield as ‘an ancient gentleman’ who gave one man out caught when his bat was ‘not within half a foot of the ball’, and another man run out when he was ready to play the next ball. The newspaper added sourly: ‘It is due to the umpire to say that his decisions were not given without ample deliberation on his part, and he is evidently a man of whom any eleven whose umpire he happened to be might justly be proud.’ In other words, umpires could be brazenly partial. In the 1880s, Jack Wright from Wymeswold club in rural Leicestershire became Skegness professional, and the two teams arranged a match. Wright was easily stumped when he had made six; only for the umpire, a neighbour and old friend of Wright’s, to recall him as not out. The batsman went on to make 172 for Skegness. Afterwards, the Wymeswold players confronted the umpire. ‘I likes to see Jack bat,’ the umpire told them, ‘He can ‘it.’ The wronged players were so taken aback, they left it at that. As J.Arthur Gibbs shrewdly noted in his account of late Victorian Gloucestershire, A Cotswold Village , it took moral courage for an umpire to give someone of his side in, when he knows perfectly well they are out. What could a team do? They could do the same, as A.E.Leach recalled in