M Johnson: Evening Draws In On Bird's Long Match (22 Jan 1996)

Electronic Telegraph Monday 22 January 1996

Evening draws in on Bird`s long watch

He said I were best umpire that ever lived. Ian said I were honest, I were fair, and I were consistent. He also said I were bonkers` Martin Johnson has lunch with Dickie Bird

WE MET for lunch in his favourite restaurant near Barnsley - "you can have as much on your plate as you want here you know. light meter! There`ll be no play before lunch here," he chortled.

I thought he looked a bit tired. "Aye, woke up at four o`clock. Terrible dream. It were those boogers Wasim and Waqar appealing for lbws again," he said. "Did you give any?" I inquired. "Nay. `Not out! Not out!`, I were shoutin`."

Anyone inside hoping for a quiet meal was out of luck. The world`s most famous cricket umpire was in irrepressible form and his voice carried all the way to Rotherham, never mind the next table. For some reason, a diner came over and started telling us about his recent heart attack. "It`s amazin`. I`ve niver `ad one. I could worry and witter for England, me," said the man who invariably introduces himself with: "Pleased to meet you. Harold Dennis Bird, Dickie to my friends." As he hasn`t an enemy in the world, no-one calls him anything but Dickie.

He said: "I were listening to radio from South Africa t`other day, and Ian Botham paid me a lovely compliment. He said I were best umpire that ever lived. Tremendous that. Ian said I were honest, I were fair, and I were consistent. That`s what he said. He also said I were bonkers."

All this was spoken with one arm pinning my eating hand to the plate, and the familiarly manic delivery style which suggests that the information he is imparting is beyond human comprehension. "D`yer know? D`yer know, what? This is true, this is. . ." is how he normally opens a topic of conversation, and just when you think he is about to reveal something that will shake the cricket world to its foundations, he is just as likely to say: "D`yer know? D`yer know what? I had two poached eggs for me breakfast. I did. Aye. It`s true is that."

On the field, he hunches over the bowling stumps with the screwed up grimace of a man who is sitting on the wrong end of a shooting stick with a couple of thousand volts running through it, by the way he constantly jerks out his arms. Every now and again, albeit not often enough as far as bowlers are concerned, one of his arms shoots vertically above his head.

HE is already worrying - not least, being an emotional man - about how many boxes of tissues he will need.

"That`s out! That`s out!" he cries, almost tearfully, as though he has just sentenced someone to death rather than a return trip to the pavilion. Most of all, though, he worries about anything and everything, and is rarely without that "why does it always happen to me?" expression.

He has made a career out of peering at the sky, although once, when water began gushing up his trouser leg from a burst drain at Headingley, trouble came from the opposite direction. He has ended a five-year drought in Sharjah by the simple expedient of putting three stumps into the ground and calling `play` and he has also brought the teams off the field for, would you believe, an excess of sun in Manchester. But after the final day of the Lord`s Test against India on June 24, Harold Dennis Bird will retire from the international stage at the age of 63.

HE is already worrying - not least, being an emotional man - about how many boxes of tissues he will need. If play is held up while the groundstaff are chucking sawdust on the umpire`s tears, it will be the ultimate entry in Dickie`s "it always happens to me" ledger.

"I`m praying already," he says. `Dear Lord, no rain please, no bad light. Not for this game, dear Lord.`

"I`ve been out in Australia umpiring the series with Pakistan, and the first morning of the first game in Hobart, there`s a close run-out. So I call for the TV. I wait for the lights to go on, but nothing happens. They`ve broken down. Oh Christ, not me again, I think. They come on the walkie talkie. `Sorry Dickie, we`ve had a breakdown. You`ll have to do it yourself`. Always happens to me.

"It`s like that time we had the blocked drain at Leeds. I said to Shep [co-umpire David Shepherd] `We`ve got a problem.` He says, `Stick some sawdust down Dickie`. I say, `Sawdust?` We`ll need three lorry loads.` So off we come and I know I`m in for it. There`s this bloke screaming, `You again, Bird. Every bloody time you come here.` So I said to him, `What d`yer mean me again? It`s like a boating pond out there. I`m an umpire, not a bloody plumber`."

"I`m in favour of TV replays and the third umpire. Just as long as they don`t start using them for lbws and such like."

He has no doubts he is going at the right time - "it`s a younger man`s job nowadays" - although he denies the suggestion that it is television`s increasing intrusion into what was once a job for humans only which has hastened his decision two years ahead of compulsory retirement age.

Bird is not comfortable with machines, as anyone who has heard his telephone answering machine - it sounds like a Dalek with a Yorkshire accent reading from a cue card - will know, but he says: "I`m in favour of TV replays and the third umpire. Just as long as they don`t start using them for lbws and such like."

Bird made his name turning down lbw appeals. Early on in his umpiring career, he attended a Yorkshire practice and asked the players to bowl at a set of stumps. "D`yer know, d`yer know . . I said, `Gentlemen, please, will someone please hit these stumps so I can go home`. Look at these shoot-outs they have in cup games. Nobody can hit t`bloody wicket. Yer see, it`s all about angles."

Bird`s lasting legacy, particularly in the modern hard-nosed era of sledging, pressurised appealing and non-walking, is the fact that no other umpire earned such unqualified respect from players from every cricketing nation.

EVEN in Pakistan, where English umpires are generally regarded as strong candidates for a fatwa, Bird is regarded as the best there has been. This is partly due to his decision-making, but mostly down to the curious fact that Dickie in one of his flaps has a curiously calming influence on the most heated situation.

When a fielder claims what Bird feels is a dubious catch, or there is some dispute as to whether a ball has gone over the boundary or not, it is not unusual to see Dickie sprinting across to conduct his own investigation. "I`ll go up to `em, look em in the eye, and say, `Look, I`m here now, and I want you to be honest. If you lie to me, I`ll say, the good Lord will send you straight to hell.`

"I remember Merv Hughes swearing at [Graeme] Hick in a Test at Headingley and I went up to him and I said, `Mervyn, Mervyn, goodness me. Why are you swearing at that man? What harm has Mr Hick ever done you? Mervyn, your language is terrible. Terrible.` And Mervyn looked at me and said, `Dickie, you`re a legend.`

The happiest day of his life, he says, was when he was invited to lunch with the Queen - "got more than a toasted sandwich"

"He`s got a chat show on the radio in Australia now. Invited me on it last time I was in Melbourne. Lovely lad off the field. He`s a character, too. Not many of those around any more. That Dennis Lillee, he put a rubber snake in me pocket. In a Test match, too. Would that happen today? Would it bloody hell."

Dickie never got married - "married to cricket" - and his sister comes in to cook and clean for him. He lives in the South Yorkshire mining village of Staincross, about a mile from Geoffrey Boycott. "Huge place he`s got, but I`ve got better views over the Pennines. He invited me round to lunch once, but I didn`t get any answer from these machines he`s got on his front gate and had to climb over the wall. Toasted cheese sandwich was what I got. Then I was in Delhi once, and he said, `Dickie, I`m going to take you to dinner.` I said, `Hang on a minute while I lie down.`

miser I`ve ever met in my life. You`ll put all your money in your coffin when you go, and I hope I`m still around when they bury you, cos I`ll be right over to the graveyard to dig it up.` Anyway, off I went to meet him for dinner in the hotel foyer, and he gave me two bars of fruit and nut, and said, `Have a nice dinner, Dickie,` and off he went. If I had to pick a man to bat for my life it would be Boycott, but he`d want to know how much it was worth before he took guard."

The happiest day of his life, he says, was when he was invited to lunch with the Queen - "got more than a toasted sandwich" - and the saddest will undoubtedly be when he leaves the Test arena for the last time at his beloved Lord`s. By the end of the 1997 summer, he will have to retire from the first-class game as well, so what will he do with himself?

He said: "Travel all over the world watching cricket and spending my money. D`yer know? D`yer know? If I plonk myself into a chair and sit in front of the telly, I`ll be dead inside 12 months. The good Lord will look down and say, `What `yer doing in that chair, Bird? I`m givin` thee out, Bird. That`s out`."

This report appeared in Saturday`s edition of The Daily Telegraph

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)