Test of Character

Description

Barbados-born John Holder arrived in England during the 1960s as part of the second wave of West Indian immigrants recruited by London Transport after the war. While working on the Underground he was recommended for a trial at Hampshire. Impressed by his speed and hostility with the ball, they signed him on the spot. For eight years, his career as an opening bowler followed an uneven course, periods of loss of form and confidence punctuated with moments of sheer brilliance, the most noteworthy both coming in his final year at Hampshire in 1972, taking 13-128 in the same match against Gloucestershire and a hat-trick against Kent. A back injury brought his county career to a close. What better way to stay in touch than to become an umpire? A first-class umpire for 27 years, he officiated in 11 Tests and 19 one-day internationals. Former teammate Andrew Murtagh had unique and unfettered access to his subject. Test of Character throws an interesting light on the job of an international umpire, with all its pressures, vicissitudes, controversies, and prejudices, leavened of course with a fair degree of humor, too.

Sujets

• Críquet
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785312427
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2016
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Andrew Murtagh, 2016
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN: 978-1-78531-177-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78531-242-7
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
A Superlative Child
London Transport 1963-66
Happy Hants 1966-72
Lancashire Leagues 1973-82
The Job of Umpiring
Around the Counties
International Cricket 1989-2001
Beyond the Boundary 2001-2015
Afterword
Photographs
This book is dedicated to Nick Daffern, a persistent and supportive champion of my writing career.
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all.
Henry James
Acknowledgements
B UT why John Holder? has been a frequent question asked of me since I started this project. The simple answer would be because he asked me. It was at one of those convivial former players reunions at Hampshire and I was at the time leaning across from my table to his and, rather bizarrely, I was stroking his shiny bald pate. You may well wonder but old friends do these things, especially when the wine is flowing. Murt, I know that s you, he announced, without turning round, Now, why don t you do something useful for once and write my biography? I could not refuse. It s difficult to refuse John anything. Once I had checked with him in the cold light of day that he was being serious, the die was cast.
The decision to proceed was no idle, altruistic gesture, it has to be said, no mere favour for an old mate. I was genuinely intrigued. The three cricket biographies that I have written are about players. John, although a former fast bowler at Hampshire in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had just retired from a long and distinguished career as a first-class umpire.
I wanted to discover what it was like to be closely involved in the game on the other side of the fence, as it were, as the man in the white coat rather than with the ball or the bat in his hand. And the more I delved, the more fascinated I became. Few players bother to put themselves into the shoes of an umpire. Many do, of course, once their careers have ended but rarely when they are still playing. Indeed, John goes so far as to say that players, even first-class players, are largely ignorant of the laws of cricket, let alone able to understand the true nature of an umpire s role. I don t think he is exaggerating. Time and again, in the process of writing this book, he had to put me right over a detail of this law or that regulation. And who hasn t stopped in the course of a match, scratched his head, looked around and seen equally puzzled expressions on the faces of his team-mates, thinking, well, I ve never seen that before? What s your decision, ump? The answer, as well as the details of the unfolding story, was often surprising.
And something else emerged during our frequent conversations as we pieced together the narrative of John s life. When you spend hour after hour, day after day, week after week in the company of a team-mate throughout the course of a season, you think you know everything there is to know about him. You know how he reacts to success and to failure. You know whether to commiserate with him when he returns to the dressing room after being dismissed or whether to make yourself scarce. You know what his preferred tipple is in the bar after play. You know whether he likes his steak well done or rare. You know whether he is a party animal or whether he prefers a quiet evening and an early night. You know how many shoes to line up beside your bed to throw at him to stop him snoring. You know how many sugars he likes with his early morning cuppa and whether he prefers his eggs at breakfast scrambled or fried. You even know whereabouts in his cricket case he packs his box or whether he is likely to have forgotten it and will soon be on the prowl to nick someone else s. And you can always sense whether he is genuinely cool or whether his show of bravado is masking his nerves.
But do you really know him? Are you as close as a brother, a lifelong companion or as a wife? Probably not. You are, after all, just colleagues (sometimes rivals) in a company, a group, a team. And your time together in the firm is necessarily short. At some stage, in your thirties usually, you bid farewell to one another and it s never the same again. So the pleasure of this joint venture, for me at any rate, has been not only renewing my close relationship with my old team-mate but also unearthing what really makes him tick, what he truthfully thinks of things and what principles he has endeavoured to apply to his professional life. For these intimate glimpses, I give him thanks.
Mind you, he has been no pushover as a subject. He has the laid-back demeanour and toothsome smile of a typical Barbadian but he is a stickler for punctuality, orderliness, procedure, routine, accuracy. I had forgotten how punctilious he is in his personal affairs. He would never have forgotten his box. And he would never have used anybody else s.
In many ways, he was born to umpire. Frequently, he would put me right on a date, a score or a matter of fact. He could remember where he was umpiring, what date, who was playing, who won, which end he was standing, what the weather was like and how the wicket was playing, at any stage of a given season. And just to underline my point, I lost count of the number of times he took me to task for using the word wicket in that context. It is not the wicket, he would say, it s the pitch! The wicket is the stumps and bails. It was a job to convince him I was not being mischievous; it was just an old habit dying hard.
Sometimes you need a tough taskmaster to keep you focused. Far from resenting his demands for precision and accuracy, I welcomed them. I wanted to get it right, for his sake and for mine. Of course, nothing is ever perfect, despite your fervent wishes and best efforts. Accordingly, any mistakes that are in this book -and there are bound to be a few - are more likely to be mine than John s.
I am indebted to many people who have been generous with their time and help in the writing of this book. I name them in no other order than chronological: Tim Murtagh, Neil Holder, Mel Cummins, Monica Harris, Felicia Holder, Tom Graveney OBE, Vincent Nurse, Earl Williams, Vernon Williams, Cedolph Kennedy, Keith Wheatley, Alan Castell, Richard Gilliat, Richard Lewis, Trevor Jesty, Bill Buck, Pat Pocock, Paul Nixon, Matthew Maynard, Nick Pocock, Mark Nicholas, Roger Tolchard, Rodney Cass, Jonathan Agnew, Vic Marks, Barrie Leadbeater, Lin Murtagh, Di Charteris, Paul Trevillion for his stories and artwork and not least, my faithful and painstaking editor, Ruth Sheppard.
I would also like to thank all at Pitch Publishing, including Paul and Jane Camillin, Duncan Olner, Graham Hales and Dean Rockett.
Finally, John would like to thank his mother and his two brothers, Neil and Paul.
Foreword
MICHAEL HOLDING
(West Indies fast bowler and TV commentator)
T HERE aren t too many umpires out there that can claim to have given Sachin Tendulkar batting advice. John Holder did that in Tendulkar s debut Test, on a green top in Karachi in 1989 - Take your time was the gist of it. Those were the days when umpires not only officiated but saw themselves as nurturers and I can say I have been the beneficiary myself of advice as a young man from umpires in those long-ago days. Those four India-Pakistan Tests were the high watermark of John s white-coat career, as he and John Hampshire became only the second set of neutral umpires to officiate in a Test series. In other words John was a part of the pioneering of independent umpires. By the time officials from a third country became mandatory a few years later, John had been dropped from the Test panel, the price he paid for being a man of strong principles.
In the summer of 1991, England and West Indies arrived at the Oval for the final Test with the visitors 2-1 up in the series. After seeing inch-long gouge marks on the ball, John went to Graham Gooch, the England captain, and told him in no uncertain terms that one of his players was tampering with the ball. He included his account of the incident in his Test report as well. That was in August 1991, and John was 46 years old. It would be another decade before he was asked to umpire in his 11th and final Test.
Born in Barbados, the island that gave the cricketing world Sir Garfield Sobers, the three Ws (Clyde Walcott, Everton Weekes and Frank Worrell), Malcolm Marshall and so many others, John was initially noticed for his exploits as a brisk pace bowler at Hampshire. He spent only seven years on the south coast, a spell that included a first-class hat-trick against Kent in 1972. After spells of league cricket in Lancashire and Yorkshire, he became a first-class umpire in 1983, at a time when the transition from player to match official didn t seem as unusual as it is now.
After his spell at the highest level was cut short, John worked as an umpires performance manager for the International Cricket Council, and did his best to demystify the officials craft by contributing to the You Are The Umpire comic strip, later made into a book.
After