Squire Mitchley still sparky after all these years

Cyril Mitchley was about to change cricket forever. As he did so, he told Cricbuzz, he thought to himself: "I'm standing in the middle of Kingsmead. What the hell am I doing making a square in the air?"

It was after lunch on November 14, 1992, and Sachin Tendulkar had pushed a delivery from Brian McMillan fine of backward point and set off on a sharp single. Ravi Shastri, Tendulkar's partner, knew better than to do that: the fielder was Jonty Rhodes.

"No!" Shastri boomed as only he could, but Tendulkar was well on his way. Rhodes swooped, gathered the ball, cocked his arm, and let fly. Omar Henry, in the gully, had the good sense to duck. Andrew Hudson dashed to the stumps from short leg, took the throw and broke the wicket as he rolled onto his back. Tendulkar had scrambled back, but had he made his ground in time?

The appeal duly went up, but no-one was convinced. Rhodes stood with his hands clasped on top of his capped head, a picture of uncertainty. Kepler Wessels sauntered towards the pitch, his stoney visage unmoved and unmoving except for his lower mandible pulverising a piece of chewing gum. McMillan, open-mouthed, shoved his anvil of a jaw into the air in questioning fashion.

Was that out?

Mitchley was the square leg umpire, and had a good view of proceedings in the gap between Tendulkar and Hudson. But he didn't know: "It was very close. I wasn't sure. I would have probably given him not out."

Mitchley didn't do that. Instead, for the first time in cricket history, an umpire didn't make a decision on the field. The square in the air was a signal to Karl Liebenberg, the third umpire, who studied the replays and was able to satisfy himself that Tendulkar had not reached safety before Hudson, ball in hands, splattered the stumps. So Liebenberg pushed a button, which illuminated a green light. In those days, that meant out.

The South Africans celebrated sheepishly even as Tendulkar stalked off, apparently insulted to have been treated in such a manner. Maybe that was when and where India's longstanding aversion to DRS, which centred on Tendulkar's invaluable wicket, was spawned.

By then, the match was already groundbreaking. Never before had India, or any other team who were not entirely white, played in South Africa. Never had South Africa fielded an XI who were not entirely white. Not since March 1970 had Tests been played in South Africa.

Wessels and Pravin Amre scored centuries, but it is the DRS era's big bang moment that is remembered most. More than 32 years on, electronic umpiring has come a long way. With its interminable hair-splitting robbing the game of drama sparked in the moment, had it gone too far?

"I know it's the modern day, but we're taking a little bit away from cricket," Mitchley said. "We're saying umpires are the only people who are not allowed to make mistakes. Only players can make mistakes.

"Cricket is a slow game and they're slowing it up even more with DRS. Sometimes you're waiting for a decision for five or six minutes. But we have to live with the times - this is what people want to see.

"So to a degree I agree with it. I have to say it's a good thing. At least the decisions are 100% right. But you are losing something of the character of the game."

Because umpires are part of cricket's spectacle. They're not faceless, pulseless bystanders devoid of personality. Umpires are almost as central to the game as players.

"Take Billy Bowden," Mitchley said. "He wasn't the greatest umpire in the world, but he was something to watch. Cricket's gone backwards in that department."

Mitchley was a fine umpire as well as "something to watch". His spectacled, jowled, no-nonsense face peered out from under a flat cap. The sleeves of his white coat were rolled up to the elbows. The tip of his tie was tucked into his shirt to stop it flapping in the breeze and distracting the batter. When he gave you out, you knew it: he would wag his pointed finger at you once, twice, sometimes three times.

He walked with a swagger, no doubt honed while growing up in Johannesburg's tough southern suburbs. That explains why he is, famously, deaf in one ear: "I took a punch on the ear in a pub one night, and that burst my eardrum."

But he remembers nothing about Jonty Rhodes, allegedly, arriving in the dressingroom in a filthy mood after being given out caught behind by Mitchley. "I know I nicked that ball, but Cyril's deaf," Rhodes apparently fumed. "How the hell did he hear it?"

Mitchley didn't need to hear faint edges because he umpired as much with his gut as he did with his long experience as a player and his skills as an official. Until, that is, Brian Basson, who ended his long career in administration as CSA's general manager of cricket operations, ordered umpires to undergo hearing tests.

"I obviously failed, and that was that. But my umpiring came to an end at the right time, because my hearing was getting worse. And that's when I became a match referee for 10 years."

There was no separating Mitchley from the game. "Cricket is part of our family," he said. Mitchley spent years behind the stumps for Southern Suburbs and was good enough to play eight first-class and two list A matches, which helped his transition to umpiring: "A 'keeper probably gets the best view of an lbw compared to anybody else on the field other than the umpire." His three sons, Cyril junior, Mark and Scott, all played first-class cricket.

Mitchley stood in 26 Tests and 61 ODIs from November 1992 to April 2000. He stood in his last notable match, a first-class game between Northerns and Western Province in Centurion, in March 2001. He was the television official in seven Tests and 21 ODIs, and the match referee in four ODIs. At the Gabba in November 1994 he became the first neutral umpire to stand in an Ashes Test.

His colleague was Steve Randell, a Tasmanian primary school teacher who in August 1999 was sentenced to four years in jail for sexually assaulting nine girls aged from 10 to 12. Mitchley knows this, but that doesn't stop him from lauding Randell's abilities on the field.

"Steve was a fine, fine, fine umpire; probably one of the best I've stood with."

What made him so good?

"The players respected him because he was strong and fair. There were others I stood with who the players thought were good. But then there was a lot of talk about them after stumps."

Mitchley wears controversial opinions like that as comfortably as he used to sport a flat cap. He doesn't do so to be noticed. He does so because that's what he really thinks. You think differently? Fine. Nobody's forcing you to agree with him.

How, for instance, might he have handled the firecracker known as Virat Kohli?

"I know what I would have done to him on the football field, quite easily," Mitchley, who played football professionally as an inside forward, said. "In most cricket sides you're going to find one bloke who's always out of line, and he was one of them. But look at his record - he's a damn good cricketer."

In team terms, "I always got on well with the English, and the West Indians weren't too bad. India at times were not bad at all."

Australia? "I enjoyed Mark Waugh and Mark Taylor, but you also had the other Waugh brother. Steve was a bloody a***hole. He was very difficult, a sulky guy."

It might be considered contentious that Mitchley gave Dominic Cork two lbws in his Test hattrick against West Indies at Old Trafford in July 1995. But watch replays of what happened after Richie Richardson played on, and it's difficult not to agree that Junior Murray and Carl Hooper were stone dead.

There's a legend that Herschelle Gibbs, early in his career, was told by his teammates that if he wanted to keep Mitchley sweet, he should call him by his nickname of Squire - a contraction of what had been known in Joburg club cricket during Mitchley's playing days as "Cyril's choir", the Southern Suburbs' cordon, whose ardent appeals were orchestrated by their wicketkeeper.

Little did Gibbs know the privilege of addressing Mitchley in that familiar fashion was the preserve of seasoned players who had proven themselves, not flashy prodigies like Gibbs was then. What happened next may or may not be true, but it makes a decent yarn.

Gibbs: "Two-leg please, Squire."

Mitchley: "That's two-leg, sonny, and who's your f*****g Squire?"

The episode, if it happened, has faded from Mitchley's recollection. But it is testament to the high regard in which Mitchley is still held that Gibbs told Cricbuzz: "I wish I could remember that. Hilarious!"

Umpiring has changed so much since Mitchley's era. "What I won't do is give an lbw if there's any doubt in my mind," he said in a speech to the Cricket Society of South Africa in September 1997. "In fact, if I find myself asking if the ball would've hit the stumps or how big a stride the batsman took then there's already doubt and I won't give it. If I'm convinced that the appeal is good then my finger goes up immediately."

These days the gizmos, which were first deployed by Mitchley, do much of the work. Given the rise of technology, how might actual umpiring improve? "I've never thought of it getting better," he said. "I think it's probably at its premium at the moment."

Mitchley should know, having spent 68 years in the game. That's more than three-quarters of his life, which reached the first day of its 88th year on Friday. Happy birthday Squire.