LITMIR.BIZ

      For it was not just his ability to get decisions right far more often than not, but his feel for the way the game should be played that marked Dickie out as the outstanding ‘cheat’ of my time.

      As a reader of lbws and catches behind and off bat-and-pad, Dickie was without equal. Towards the end of his career he gained the reputation of being a ‘not-outer’, a batsman’s umpire, but, even from a bowler’s perspective, I felt that was a trifle unfair. His great strength as a decision-maker was his instinct for what was out and what wasn’t. Dickie never left a batsman dangling. If the finger wasn’t raised by the time you looked up to discover your fate, you knew you were safe. But although he was quick on the draw, his first sight was almost always correct. And I can honestly say that in all my years in Test cricket I never, ever got a bad decision from him. And if Dickie did get one wrong, any hurt the batsman may have suffered disappeared the moment he saw the look on Dickie’s face. ‘This,’ said the expression just as the digit began its journey skyward, ‘is going to hurt me more than it will you.’

      Dickie had a way of behaving with players that let you know who was boss, but didn’t ram it down your throat. Some critics derided him for being a showman, claiming that Dickie liked the television cameras a little too much. But his final, farewell appearance in June 1996, fittingly at Lord’s for the second Test between England and India, proved the point that he never allowed the spotlight at the centre of the stage to blind him to the job in hand. The standing ovation that greeted Dickie on the first morning was not only overwhelming, it was unprecedented. Few players had received so rapturous a welcome in their final match; an umpire, never. Yet after milking the moment for all he was worth and filling his handkerchief with tears, by the time the fifth ball of the match was bowled by Javagal Srinath at Mike Atherton, Dickie could see well enough to give a rock-solid lbw decision in the bowler’s favour.

      Right from his first year as a Test umpire back in 1973, strange things happened whenever Dickie was around. In the second half of that summer, the West Indies played a three-Test series and in two of the matches Dickie was confronted by situations that no one could have forecast in their wildest dreams. First, in the second Test at Edgbaston, his partner Arthur Fagg went on strike in protest at the behaviour of the West Indies captain Rohan Kanhai. Fagg had given Boycott not out to a catch by wicket-keeper Deryck Murray off Keith Boyce, and Kanhai at first slip had spent the remaining two hours of the day moaning about it. The following morning Dickie arrived in the umpire’s changing room at around 9 am to find Fagg packing his bag. Fagg had wanted an apology from Kanhai which was not forthcoming; he was at the end of his tether, and argued that the enjoyment had gone out of the game because the players did not respect the umpires’ judgement any more, and there was too much at stake. He told a bemused Dickie: ‘I’m going home. I’m taking no further part in this match.’

      You can imagine how Dickie must have felt. Standing in only his second Test, he had to walk out to umpire at both ends, with substitute official Alan Oakman working from square leg. Fortunately, after deciding one over of protest was long enough to make his point, Arthur came back out to join his fellow umpire. Dickie told me later he had never felt so relieved in his life.

      As if that wasn’t enough controversy, in the very next Test at Lord’s, for which he was a late replacement for an unwell Bert Rhodes, play was interrupted on the Saturday afternoon by a bomb scare. It was at the height of the IRA terror campaign in London, and Dickie suddenly found himself surrounded by 28,000 spectators who had decided the pitch was the safest place to be and wandered out to join him in the middle.

      From then on, trouble and comedy followed him like a couple of mischievous minders. But, after that little lot, he was able to take the rest in his stride – overflowing drains, firecrackers as Bob Willis ran up to bowl, newspapers going up in flames while he was reading them, finding his car on four piles of bricks, and a rubber snake in his soup bowl courtesy of Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh, or having to answer Allan Lamb’s mobile phone while standing at square leg in the middle of a Test match. And some of the above I didn’t even do.

      Meeting royalty, however, was another matter entirely. On days when Her Majesty was due to make her traditional trip to meet the players during a Lord’s Test and Dickie was on parade, his performance on the field would be extraordinary. Everything would be twitching and God help you if you got hit on the pad early on because he would be desperate to get one in the bag to relieve the tension. On the day he was due to receive his MBE in July 1986, he pitched up at Buckingham Palace all top-hatted and tailed, nice and early. How early? At 7.30 am for 12 noon, to be precise.

      Dickie once told me ‘cricket is my wife’ and predicted that without it he would be dead in six months. Thank goodness that turned out to be one of his few lousy calls. But the game was, and remains, everything to Dickie, and the players loved him for that enthusiasm. Of all the men in white coats I came across, Harold Dennis Bird was the maddest, by far. But as the world game struggles to deal with increasing pressure on umpires from players and technology, cricket would be madder still not to take full advantage of his wealth of knowledge and experience.

       Allan Border

      You can trace Australia’s rise to the summit of world cricket from the moment Allan Border decided enough was enough.

      There are those who identify that moment as the time we secured the retention of the Ashes in 1986–87 under Mike Gatting. Others will tell you that Border hit the wall when contemplating our 3–1 victory in England in 1985, a result that crowned a glorious golden summer for us but represented a severe shoeing for the Aussies.

      True, Border was on the end of heaps from the Aussie press after that series, chiefly because they felt he spent more time in our dressing room than in theirs, and it was as much his demeanour on and off the field with the old enemy, and the friendships that he so obviously maintained with guys like me, David Gower and Allan Lamb that antagonized the folks back home as the extent of their defeat. They could handle being beaten by a better side – just. What did not tickle their funny bone at all was seeing the Australian captain seemingly enjoying the company of the Poms who were beating them.

      But while the flak he took in ‘85 undoubtedly fuelled his desire for revenge – ‘I had enough of being a nice guy who came last’, he told me – I believe the mood was born even earlier. Four years earlier, to be precise.

      Talking to Allan over the years, I grew to learn that the one stone he simply could not remove

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