The Top Six No.3

This Bird you cannot change

GUEST COLUMNIST

Following the passing of Dickie Bird, who died on September 22 at the age of 92, John Stern considers the legendary umpire’s unique appeal

John STERN

‘I’ll miss it y’know,” Dickie said as I got up from the chair. It felt like curtailing a visit to an elderly relative, a cloak of guilt hanging uneasily around my shoulders.

We were sitting on the outfield at Fenner’s in Cambridge, on a couple of office chairs as I recall. It was a bit incongruous and my sense was that Dickie would have sat and chatted long into the evening. But I had a deadline to meet and a train to catch.

It was May 1998 and Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird, a few weeks after his 65th birthday, was starting his valedictory lap, ticking off the grounds where he hadn’t umpired for a while. He had cut a cake during the tea interval earlier that day in Cambridge University’s match against Durham, though it was to mark 150 years of Fenner’s rather than his own impending retirement. Funny to think, given his own future officiating career, that Michael Gough, then captain of England under-19s, scored his maiden firstclass century in front of the world’s most famous umpire on that day.