The Cricket Statistician No 195

53 after 1923. Tal himself had the worst win-to-matches ratio of any Glamorgan captain before or since. Yet this was not the worst of his troubles. The failure of his solicitor’s practice in 1923 was accompanied by a series of catastrophic investments, resulting in his being declared bankrupt in 1925. He played his last match for Glamorgan in 1923 and thereafter made a new life for himself as a schoolmaster in Sussex and later Cornwall, but ill-luck seems to have pursued him and he died while recovering from an operation in London in 1944 aged only 63. An interesting story with many excellent illustrations, the book is sadly disfigured by the proofreading which allowed some fairly obvious errors to slip through into the final published version. Examples include ‘it’s’ for ‘its’, ‘Galmorgan’, ‘obeyance’ for ‘abeyance’ and ‘extant’ for (I assume) ‘extinct’; these all collected within a few pages of each other for illustrative purposes. Richard Lawrence A Tall Story By Andrew Hignell, ACS Publications, pp132, £15 Although the former county and international umpire Nigel Plews appears to have no Welsh connections, Andrew Hignell has chosen him as the subject for a very good and pleasant biography for the ACS Cricket Witness series. Nigel, also an obviously pleasant man, was a first-class umpire between 1982 and 1999, and an international umpire between 1988 and 1996. The title comes from Nigel’s height of about six foot six and a half inches, as befits the Nottingham policeman he was, along with the quiet authority that made for a good relationship with the players of his time. Had he been able to enjoy a longer umpiring career, he would probably have earned as big a name in his second career as did the likes of Dickie Bird and David Shepherd. In fact, this book includes mention of his experiences when standing with both these two umpiring legends, one of whom he found more helpful than the other. It was rare back then for an umpire to be appointed to the first-class panel without having played county cricket himself, and Nigel was only the third in modern times to do so. Of course he had an excellent background umpiring in lesser cricket after a short playing career, and his rise to first-class level is detailed here, along with an outline of his career in the police. It is primarily a cricketing biography, with the rest of his life not ignored. For me the most interesting part of the book concerns incidents involving county and international players, some of whom include their tributes to him. These are made possible by the detailed notes that Nigel himself took, like a personal diary; this book would not have been possible in its same interesting form without these, an invaluable primary source, as befits a policeman filling in a report. Those interested in the laws of the game and application will also find incidents of this sort here too. We are given a good insight into many of the cricket people of the eighties and nineties, and Nigel himself provides an object lesson in how to carry out the duties of an umpire in the