“I don’t watch a lot of cricket anymore because the umpires piss me off. They don’t have the balls to make decisions.” – Rudi Koertzen
Telford Vice | Cape Town
RUDI Koertzen seemed to take longer to raise his finger than some of the batters he eventually pointed at had been at the crease, and he said this week nothing had changed now that he limits his appearances to club and schools games: “I won’t say it’s slower, but it’s still slow.” Happily, he’s quicker on the draw about the Covid-19 reality of Tests staffed solely by home umpires.
“If you do your job properly there shouldn’t be a difference,” Koertzen told Cricbuzz. “I never had a problem umpiring in games involving South Africa. When I go out there I’m neutral. I just see a batsman at the other end of the pitch and a bowler running past me. For me, it has never made a difference. The only place you could get intimidated by the home crowd was when you went to the MCG; bay 13, where they were drunk by lunchtime. They gave you trouble, but it never bothered me.”
Koertzen stood in 108 Tests between December 1992 and July 2010. Thirteen were in South Africa, the last of them in March 2002 — the year the ICC started exclusively appointing foreigners as on-field umpires in Tests after 10 years of settling for one from elsewhere.
The credit for ending allegations of national bias by Test umpires belongs to Imran Khan. He grew tired enough of hearing that Pakistani umpires favoured his team to invite VK Ramaswamy and Piloo Reporter — Indians, no less — to officiate in two matches of a home series against West Indies in November 1986.
It’s a shame that it should have come to that. “Neutral umpire” is an ugly, accusatory oxymoron because umpires are — or should be — neutral by definition. The clue is in the word itself. Centuries before anyone yelled an appeal on a cricket ground, umpires in other spheres of British society were called noumper, the Middle English version of a medieval French word, nonper, which came from a Latin term: par, or equal. Thus umpires were “without equal”, as in incomparable or peerless.
Shall I compare thee to that feckless fellow behind the stumps on this fine summer’s day? No, because thou art not his peer. Thou art better than that scoundrel claiming edges where there are nought, and alleging lbw even as he veers a metre and more onto the leg side to follow the line of the orb. Thou art an umpire, my good man (and they were all men), and consequently above all that stuff and nonsense.
Alas, the modern game disagrees. “I remember Bob Woolmer, when he was South Africa’s coach [from 1994 to 1999], saying to me, ‘You guys must help us.’,” Koertzen said. “Every time we go to Australia and other countries we get nailed by the home umpires. But we come back to South Africa and you guys nail us.’ I said, ‘We’re not nailing you. We’re just making the decisions as we see them.’ If I was biased there’s no way I would have done the job.
“Like Simon Taufel, I always maintain that the best umpires should stand in the Test matches, immaterial of where they come from. If South Africa are playing against Australia and Rudi Koertzen and Simon Taufel are the two best umpires, they should stand in the matches.”
In November last year, Taufel, an Australian umpire the ICC adjudged to be the best in the game from 2004 to 2008, said: “When we have neutral umpires and we don’t care they come from and they make a mistake, we are not talking about where they are coming from. So the game comes first. It is not about whether the umpire is neutral or not. It is about whether he is doing a good job or not. It should be merit-based.”
This debate has disappeared. In the nine matches played since Test cricket has crept cautiously back from the global lockdown induced by the pandemic, all umpires have been from the countries in which the matches have been played. The same will be true at Centurion on Saturday, when for the first time in 50 years in a Test in this country all the appointed umpires will be South African.
The two of them on the field for the first Test between South Africa and Sri Lanka will be Marais Erasmus, a stalwart of 62 Tests, 92 ODIs and 26 T20Is, and Adrian Holdstock, who has appeared in 23 ODIs and 30 T20Is. “It’s been 14 years in the making with lots of sacrifices and commitments along the way, so I’m just very proud and stoked that the moment has finally come,” a CSA release on Wednesday quoted Holdstock as saying about his Test debut.
In the 1990s, fast bowler Erasmus captained Boland and Holdstock was a useful allrounder in the same side. When Holdstock made his international umpiring debut, in a T20I between South Africa and Australia in October 2011, his partner was Erasmus. And it’s not as if they haven’t had to make decisions about their compatriots in the past: 16 of Erasmus’ 118 white-ball games as an umpire have featured South Africa and only 21 of Holdstock’s 63 have not.
But Test cricket is as stern an examination of umpires — and indeed scorers and reporters, even spectators — as it is of players. It demands hours of intense, draining focus and doesn’t tolerate errors, and you have to come back and do it again tomorrow and for up to three more consecutive days. That, for Holdstock at least, will be new.
Both umpires will have to get used to the echoes of an empty ground, although having come through the ranks of South African domestic cricket — where there are often more players on the field than people in the stands — should help calm nerves.
Would they need calming? Barry Lambson stood in five Tests and 35 ODIs from November 1992 to October 2001 and is now a CSA match referee. All but seven of his games were in South Africa. “It is a bit different standing at home,” Lambson told Cricbuzz. “There’s more expectation on you, a bit like when you’re a player. But there’s no crowd, so [Erasmus and Holdstock] will be fine.”
The release quoted Erasmus as saying: “We must treat this just as another normal game. We must put aside the fact South Africa is involved. That shouldn’t be an issue. This is just another Test match and to stand in any Test match is a real privilege.”
Lambson and Karl Liebenberg were the last two South African on-field umpires appointed to stand in the same Test in South Africa, the final match of the series against India at Newlands in January 1993. But they rotated with England’s David Shepherd, and so Lambson and Liebenberg stood together on only one of the five days. The last time a South African umpire was on the field in a Test in South Africa was at Kingsmead on December 27, 2006, when another Englishman, Mark Benson, took ill and was temporarily replaced by Ian Howell, who had started the match as a television umpire.
Those were the days, Koertzen might say. And he isn’t scared to explain why he thinks so: “I don’t watch a lot of cricket anymore because the umpires piss me off. They don’t have the balls to make decisions. I’m 72. I still run to get into position to make a [run out] decision. The guys these days stand behind the stumps, and then they go upstairs.
“The umpire’s job is made so much easier by the illumination of the stumps. You can’t tell me that you can’t see when the ball hits the stumps and the bails come off. There shouldn’t be pressure on the umpires. Why don’t they take the guys off the field and let the third umpire do all the work? Give him all the money — three umpires’ match fees.”
Koertzen wouldn’t be surprised to learn his view on umpiring today isn’t shared by people now in the higher levels of the game. Here, for instance, is Mickey Arthur, himself a South African and now Sri Lanka’s coach, during an online press conference on Monday: “I know the umpires in this [South Africa-Sri Lanka] series particularly well, and they’re very good umpires. Umpires, just like players, are judged on performance all the time, and I’m comfortable that both umpires in this Test match are very good.”
As for the possibility of hometown decisions skewing the contest: “I certainly don’t think any umpire around the world, whether he’s South African, Australian or whatever, is going to umpire in any way that favours the home team. I think that they’re going to go out and do the best job that they possibly can. I’ve got no issue with local umpires at all.”
Clearly, Aiden Markram hasn’t had to give the issue much thought. “Maybe the bigger challenge is playing in front of an empty stadium,” he told an online press conference on Wednesday. “In terms of what I’ve experienced, the umpires have been really good in that there hasn’t been any bias. Naturally there’s the review system for [electronic] decision-making, so that can’t be affected.
“It is something new and different because of the times that we’re going through, but I don’t think it will affect the way things are on the field too much if we have two local umpires or if they’re guys from abroad. It’s going to be up to us to create that intensity and simulate what it would be like if times were normal.”
Koertzen stepped over the boundary as an international umpire for the first time, in an ODI between South Africa and India at St George’s Park in December 1992, almost two years before Markram was born. Much has changed about cricket, and therefore umpiring, in the ensuing 28 years. But not this: Koertzen’s finger of fate still takes a long time to do its duty.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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