Dickie Bird: An umpire of his age who can never be replicated

For cricket fans of a certain age, it doesn't do much for the blood pressure to revisit old umpiring decisions with the benefit of DRS-acquired hindsight. Take any given Ashes series, or crunch passage of play against the mighty 1980s-vintage West Indians, and you'll doubtless stumble upon a moment when a perfectly pitched English inswinger curls into a presumptuously planted front pad …

"Hmm… yes, just missing leg," Jack Bannister or Tony Lewis will demure, as said toiling medium-pacer allows their appeal to be strangled at birth as they trudge forlornly back to their mark. Of course, in their heart of hearts, they will have known full well that that delivery was smashing all three, but until those stumps are physically rattled, that famously wagging finger shall remain steadfastly buried at the bottom of its ubiquitous white coat.

Harold 'Dickie' Bird, who died on Monday at the age of 92, was perhaps the most steadfast "not-outer" of the lot. Had he been plying his trade in the punitive modern era of umpiring - in which every contentious decision suffers trial by a thousand replays, and death by exponential retweet - that famously nervous disposition would scarcely have made it to the middle, let alone to Buckingham Palace for services rendered to his beloved sport.

Happily, though, Bird's career did not coincide with DRS. Shockingly, it is now 30 summers since he stood for the last of his 66 Test matches - at Lord's in 1996, when he famously wept his way to the middle through a guard of honour (then shelved that hard-won reputation with an emotional first-over triggering of Mike Atherton …). And yet, the extraordinary response to his passing underlines the extent to which his era was judged by different criteria, and that his improbable fame transcended the boundaries of his chosen field.

To that first point, cricket in the mid-1990s was still a defiantly amateur occupation, long after the professional era was supposed to have taken hold. Despite the proliferation of cameras (on the field for the most part, but also, at the height of the 1980s tabloid wars, off the field to a degree arguably unmatched to this day), the sport was to all intents and purposes self-governing.

Just as captains oversaw match arrangements and training sessions (or not, in the case of David Gower in the Caribbean in 1986), so it was down to the umpires to oversee the ensuing fixtures, and the spirit and conditions in which they were played. In cricket's potential melting pot of cultures and sensibilities, Dickie's unalloyed good nature was a language that cut across all potential disagreements. To that end, his idiosyncrasies were arguably crucial to his appeal, in the same way that Norman Wisdom became a cult figure in Albania, or Mr Bean's brand of physical comedy remains hugely popular to all manner of unlikely audiences. He was, as Matthew Engel once wrote in Wisden, "the first to combine the distinct roles of top-flight umpire and music-hall comedian".

Irrespective of circumstance, players of all persuasions could recognise and appreciate Bird's devotion to the duty of his sport, whether that be an apologetic need to raise that dreaded finger (astonishingly, he and Steve Bucknor - another reluctant decision-maker - combined for a record 17 lbws at Port-of-Spain in 1993) or his famous obstinance when adverse conditions crept into the narrative.

The stories about Dickie's stoppages-in-play are legendary - from the bomb scare that interrupted his second Test, at Lord's in 1973, to the reflection off a greenhouse that caused an excess of sunlight in his penultimate home match, at Old Trafford in 1995. More gallingly, there was the Centenary Test at Lord's in 1980 when, in a premonition of the career that he was spared from having to endure, Bird was reduced to tears by the abuse that he and David Constant received from MCC members as ten hours of play were lost to rain over the first three days.

That incident, however, was at least contained to the circumstances in which it arose. Earlier this week, by contrast, the game's foremost female umpire, Sue Redfern, was subjected to a dyspeptic press release from Lancashire that, on the one hand, decried the abuse she had received when (on the evidence available to her) she had been unable to overturn a crucial dismissal on T20 Finals Day, while also confirming that the club had "formally expressed" its disappointment at the decision to the ECB. A quiet word in the bar would have sufficed back in the day. The extent to which decisions have consequences is these days off the charts.

Happily, such scrutiny for Bird and his ilk was a world away. Instead, his career delivered fame and recognition that, even by modern standards, transcends the bounds of most cricketers, let alone sporting officials. In September 1998, when Dickie umpired his last first-class fixture, the internet was still a borderline gimmick, pumping its data down old-school landlines with the age of instant information yet to be realised. On Tuesday afternoon, by contrast, the news of his death was given top billing on most news websites - even Donald Trump's bellicose comments at the UN had to play second fiddle.

This summer, amid the 20th anniversary of the 2005 Ashes, the notion of English cricket's modern-day anonymity has been a frequent topic of discussion, and the sport's disappearance from terrestrial TV is often cited as the principal cause. And yet, Bird's fame belongs in a different echelon. The timing of his career was a key factor - he was there for the early stirrings of colour TV coverage in the 1970s, and in turn the beginnings of cricket's truly global era, including his officiating of the first three World Cup finals (all staged at his home-from-home Lord's).

But also, he epitomised a more egalitarian era, when cricket in England shared a stage and status with football as, respectively, the nation's summer and winter sports, and when the money in the latter had not rendered all competition for latent attention meaningless. In his pomp, perhaps only Ian Botham could command more universal recognition among non-cricket fans - and he was arguably the most famous sportsman in the country.

Bird was not, however, the most famous player to emerge from his legendary Barnsley youth team of the 1950s. In an astonishing quirk of his two-up, two-down upbringing, he would form lifelong friendships with two men who arguably united his twin passions of cricketing rectitude and people-pleasing. One the one hand there was Geoffrey Boycott, the opening batter that Bird (average 20.71 from 93 matches) and his nervous disposition was never quite able to become. On the other, there was Michael Parkinson, the legendary chat-show host whose appointment-to-view presence in TV's free-to-air era exceeded even Bird's seven-hours-a-day screentime during his summer Test outings. A third childhood friend, Tommy Taylor, might even have outstripped them all. But tragically, as a Manchester United footballer, he died in 1958 in the Munich air disaster, at the age of 26.

The conditions do not exist for another Dickie Bird to burst forth into the game. He was, as he often protested when quizzed about his bachelor status, "married to cricket", and it was as enduring a relationship as there can ever have been. But the foibles and embellishments that make up his inimitable story have no place in modern cricket, still less the tales of practical jokes that followed him out to the middle - rubber snakes, mobile phones, firecrackers et al - all of which would these days attract ICC demerit points, rather than foster a sense of participants enjoying the stage together.

There were others who came after Dickie who brought their own quirks and personalities to the middle - foremost among them, Billy Bowden with his crooked digits and expressive boundary signalling, and Rudi Koertzen with his glacially slow finger of death. But throughout their own careers - overlain as they were with pitch-map graphics and instant feedback on each decision - there was an undercurrent of impatience at their antics, as if any action that wasn't devoted to the cause of accuracy was, frankly, a waste of energy.

Out of this new reality, a different breed of umpire emerged, perhaps best epitomised by Australia's Simon Taufel, who officiated his first international at the age of 27 and was named ICC Umpire of the Year for five years from inception. His safe, unshowy, middle-manager style has arguably been the template for all subsequent elite-panel appointments, and sure enough, the number of truly contentious decisions has plummeted in recent years.

In its place, however, the most enervating modern-day gripe seems to revolve around slow over-rates, which is surely a by-product of a loss of humanity out in the middle. If umpires are meant only to be glorified hat-stands, it's hardly a surprise that they lack the authority to chivvy along the contest of which they used to be in charge.

Bird would not have stood for such dilly-dallying, unless of course it related to a burst water-pipe at Headingley or an errant pigeon flapping around on a good length. He belonged to an era when cricket still was only a game, and he kept it all the richer by sharing that knowledge with all who crossed his white lines.

As David Hopps, my former colleague at ESPNcricinfo and another forthright Yorkshireman, put it: "Whenever I met Dickie, I always felt that I was being invited to reacquaint myself with my inner child. He knew no other way."