White on Green by Richard Heller & Peter Oborne

Author:Richard Heller & Peter Oborne [Heller, Richard and Oborne, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

26

A TALE OF TWO UMPIRES

In 1987, after his on-field confrontation with England captain Mike Gatting, Shakoor Rana became a demonic figure in the British media. Perceived as incompetent, officious and biased, he served as the archetypal Pakistan umpire. The Sun newspaper even promoted a dartboard with his face on it: readers who threw a double-top would zap him right between the eyes. 1

By 2015, Pakistan’s Aleem Dar was recognised as one of the world’s finest umpires. In his elegant fedora, he had established a new image for his country’s officials: calm, scrupulous, authoritative. At the time of writing (January 2016) he has just completed 100 Test matches as umpire – the third to achieve this (after Steve Bucknor and Rudi Koertzen) and at 47, the youngest. He has also umpired 178 one-day internationals.

He was one of many players who took up umpiring after giving up hope of a top-flight career as a player. Having made that decision, he pursued his new goal with great dedication, as he narrated to us below.

However, behind Aleem Dar is a less familiar story, of how Pakistan has set out to improve the status and standard of all its officials. This emerged from the 27-year career of Aleem Dar’s domestic colleague, Javed Ashraf.

Aleem Dar was born in the provincial town of Jhang, in the Punjab in 1968. ‘I belong to a middle-class family. My father was an attorney in the police service. I was always very fond of cricket, but he was posted frequently to different cities and most of them had no proper cricketing facilities, so I never got any coaching or training. I actually started proper cricket only when my parents shifted to Gujranwala City when I was in my teens. Then I got admitted to Islamia College, Civil Lines, Lahore [a famous cricket nursery], on the basis of cricket and did my BA in Humanities. I had two colleagues in college who went on to play Test cricket – Aaqib Javed and Wasim Akram. I also played a lot of cricket against Saqlain Mushtaq and Saeed Ajmal. Meanwhile, I joined the P&T Gymkhana Club, which produced two other Test umpires apart from me: Athur Zaidi and Asad Rauf.’

As an off-spinning all-rounder, 2 he had a first-class career of 17 matches spread over 11 years. His top first-class score was 39 but there were several centuries at grade II level, including two in the same match against the Services XI. ‘After realising that I might not join Pakistan’s squad of Test cricket [a fine example of meiosis] I started umpiring as I wanted to stay connected with cricket. My early days of umpiring were quite tough and rough. I did my umpiring course and conducted grade two and then grade one matches. I was very lucky to officiate in nineteen first-class games in the first year of my umpiring career.’

The first was in March 1999: Sargodha versus Lahore City, in the company of the experienced Siddiq Khan. He was 30 years old – four years younger than the Sargodha captain, Akram Raza.

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