The Summer Field

147 affair we cannot blame an umpire for making a mistake: but when men are given out so grossly unfair we think the matter ought not to be allowed to pass over without comment.’ To add weight to their criticism, newspapers did credit umpires, as in August 1839 when the Sheffield batsman Henry Sampson was given out for hitting the ball twice off Leicester’s Samuel Dakin. The other batsman urged Sampson to run, and the fielders appealed. ‘We think the umpire quite right in his decision,’ the Sheffield Independent reported, ‘seeing that the running warranted the inferences that the hit was intentional.’ That umpires were so often untrusted might help explain — besides a style of batting that kept unprotected legs out of the line of the stumps — why so few leg before decisions were given. The score book of Corfe club south of Taunton, for example, shows only 28 leg befores in 69 completed innings between the first in 1859 and the mid-1860s. Hence clubs formed leagues to do away with the home umpire giving favours; except that umpires were typically old players. Just as railway companies gave jobs in signal boxes to men who had arms or legs amputated after shunting accidents, and men injured down mines took less physical jobs on the surface, so a county umpire’s or scorer’s job was a reward for the long-serving and obedient professional. Umpires stood for authority, and wore the symbolic white coat of office. In truth, umpires were hired hands. Captains took decisions for themselves; when storms kept Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire off the field at Bristol in August 1875, W.G.Grace and Richard Daft agreed at 6pm not to try to play any more. Umpires did not dare to cross players. ‘There is one thing certain,’ WG told The Strand in 1895, ‘and that is, you will never get an umpire to no-ball a suspicious bowler who is allowed to take part in present cricket.’ That remained true – with exceptions, as ever - as professionals became the norm in the first half of the 20 th century, and more powerful in the second half. As one English first-class umpire said of the Sri Lankan bowler Muralitharan in 2014, ‘lovely bloke, dodgy action’. * Few troubled to wonder how thankless umpiring was: the all-day concentration, the standing, and the forever being taken for granted. It was telling how few professional cricketers studied umpiring even though they might have gained new insights, as a welcome change from their fielding drills, and they seemed always to have time for football, computer games and the gym. Even if showing an interest in umpiring did not make them better bowlers and batsmen, it might have won an umpire’s sympathy, which might have resulted in some practical gain, or a spiritually uplifting fellow feeling. Why such indifference to umpiring? Were pro’ cricketers too self-centred? Was umpiring something old men did? Or was the responsibility of umpiring – rather than shouting ‘how’s that?!’ every time you felt like it – too much? In Country Life in June 1980, Colin Cowdrey reported how unnerving umpiring could be: The truth is that on more occasions than umpires might care to admit they are completely in the dark, depending on their feel for situations Umpiring and Scoring