“As a junior umpire you might think, ‘Maybe it is six overs. He’s Ricky Ponting — surely he knows what he’s doing.’ But I knew it was seven. I had studied the regulations. You learn all those lessons, and you learn to stand your ground.” - Marais Erasmus
An edited extract from “Marais Erasmus: The Rock ’n Roll Years; Cricket in an Umpire’s Orbit” by Telford Vice (Naledi):
IN Marais Erasmus’ first international, a T20I between South Africa and Australia at the Wanderers in February 2006, Ricky Ponting changed his field immediately six overs had been bowled. It was, after all, the end of the powerplay. Or so Ponting thought. The match was only the sixth men’s T20I, and playing regulations for the format were still fluid. In that series, the powerplay lasted seven overs. Ponting didn’t know that.
“I told him, ‘No — one more over.’,” Erasmus says. “He said it’s six overs. He was a fighter and he wanted to argue about it. I told him the regulations said seven overs. He hadn’t read them.”
The match was the 351st of the 560 Ponting would play for Australia, and his 145th as their captain. He was 11 years into his international career, which would endure for almost another six years. Ponting was a giant of the world game. Erasmus was on debut at that level, where the respect he had earned as a player wasn’t worth as much as in the domestic arena.
“As a junior umpire you might think, ‘Maybe it is six overs. He’s Ricky Ponting — surely he knows what he’s doing.’ But I knew it was seven. I had studied the regulations. You learn all those lessons, and you learn to stand your ground.”
Erasmus’ ODI debut, for two men’s matches between Kenya and Canada in Nairobi in October 2007, came about in odd circumstances. Darrell Hair had been pencilled in to stand in those games, which would have added to their significance in the wake of what had happened in a men’s Test between England and Pakistan at the Oval in August 2006.
On the fourth day of that match, Hair and his colleague, West Indian Billy Doctrove, determined that the Pakistanis had tampered with the ball and docked them five penalty runs. The Pakistan dressingroom was enraged, and their players refused to take the field after tea.
Thirty minutes after play was due to resume, the umpires lifted the bails and declared the match over: Pakistan had forfeited the game, which meant England had won. The Pakistanis emerged 25 minutes after that, but were told they were too late and that the forfeiture stood.
Almost a month later, the International Cricket Council (ICC) cleared Inzamam-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s captain, of ball-tampering. But he was found guilty on the catch-all charge of bringing the game into disrepute because he and the players under his authority had not returned to the field as required. Inzamam was banned for four ODIs.
On the same day, the ICC cited security concerns for their decision to remove Hair from the list of umpires for the Champions Trophy in India that October and November.
In terms of what cricket calls its laws — they really should be termed rules — the umpires were correct in what they did at the Oval. But the affair was poorly handled, and reinforced the longstanding narrative among Pakistan’s supporters that if a raw deal was on offer their team would definitely get it.
Hair — an abrasive Australian whose ego tended to overshadow his often excellent umpiring — emailed the ICC after the match to say he would resign from the Elite Panel in exchange for a payment of US$500,000, which he said was meant to cover the loss of future earnings. Two days later Hair retracted the offer, but the damage had been done.
Before the Oval Test, the ICC ranked Hair as the world’s second-best umpire and the best in terms of decision-making — in which he had a success rate of 95.5%. But that no longer mattered, and in November 2006, after a meeting in Mumbai that dragged on for two days, Hair was barred from officiating in internationals until the end of his contract.
“I think we owe Mr Hair the courtesy of allowing his future to be discussed by him with our management before we go anywhere further in the matter,” Percy Sonn, the ICC president, told a press conference. That seemed to clear a path to restore Hair to the highest level, and he was.
He stood in three men’s ODIs in Mombasa in January 2007, part of an associate triangular series featuring Kenya, Scotland and Canada — one of which was called off because the Canadians were hit by a stomach bug and could not field an XI. Hair also umpired in four men’s ODIs in Nairobi later that January and in February, and one in Toronto and three in Belfast in July. But this was not the manner to which he had become accustomed. So when the ICC asked him to return to Nairobi in October 2007 …
“He was supposed to do those ODIs, but he said, ‘I’m not going back to Kenya,” Erasmus says. “So they called me — ‘Can you do those games?’ I said fair enough, and Kenya versus Canada was my ODI debut. There was no television and no streaming, so it was slightly less pressured. But it was still international cricket.”
Hair went through a litigious phase, saying in February 2007 that he would sue the ICC and the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) for race discrimination. He is white and copped much of the flak from the fallout after the Oval incident. Doctrove is black and did not. Closer to the truth is that Doctrove does not go around picking fights with people in obnoxious ways.
It was Hair who launched the exclusively Australian umpiring vendetta against Sri Lankan off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan, who he called for chucking seven times during the 1995 Boxing Day Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Donald Bradman slammed that as the “worst example of umpiring that I witnessed, and against everything the game stands for. Clearly, Murali does not throw the ball.”
Fellow Aussie umps Tony McQuillan and Ross Emmerson followed Hair’s example at the Gabba in Brisbane in January 1996. Emmerson did so again at Adelaide Oval in January 1999. Several rounds of scientific testing of Muralitharan’s bowling action, and a change in the maximum degree of elbow flexion bowlers are allowed, would prove Bradman correct.
High-profile bowlers weren’t Hair’s only targets. He reduced Grant Flower — among the toughest cricketers alive but also the epitome of slow left-arm ordinary bowlers — to a sobbing mess on the field by calling him for throwing during a Test against New Zealand in Bulawayo in September 2000.
Hair dropped his legal challenge against the ICC and the PCB in October 2007. He made it back to Test cricket in two matches between England and New Zealand at Old Trafford and Trent Bridge in May and June 2008, but they were his last appointments at that level.
The headlines last featured Hair in October 2017, when the Orange Local Court in New South Wales heard his admission of guilt on charges of embezzlement and theft of more than AUS$9,000 from the liquor store at which he worked. Hair said he had been compelled to steal the money by a gambling addiction.
Umpires come in many different shapes and sizes, and they are of a wide range of personalities and characters. Their fellowship includes figures as disparate as Dickie Bird, Cyril Mitchley, Steve Bucknor, Billy Bowden, Simon Taufel and Srinivasaraghavan Venkataraghavan. And Steve Randell, a primary school teacher from Tasmania who in August 1999 was sentenced to four years in jail on 15 counts of sexual assault committed against nine girls aged from 10 to 12. All are umpires, but not all umpires are the same.
The chasm that yawns between Marais Erasmus and some of his peers proves the point. That doesn’t mean Erasmus has lived a quiet, uneventful life in the game. Far from it. But he has lived it better than most.
Cricbuzz
“Marais Erasmus: The Rock ’n Roll Years; Cricket in an Umpire’s Orbit” by Telford Vice is available in bookshops and from Naledi’s site.
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