Author: Not Out

You can choose love or hate…I choose love. (Johnny Cash) A glorious late August day greets the penultimate match of the season. With nothing at stake – both tea...

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. (Henry David Thoreau) Over the years, I’ve met some great characters on the circuit, guys who can tell a ...

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in. (Isaac Asimov) We should never forget th...

Sometimes there’s not a better way. Sometimes there’s only the hard way. (Mary E. Pearson) It’s Friday evening and I get a call from the secretary of the League...

Tolerance is nothing more than patience with boundaries. (Shannon Adler) It is one of those afternoons where little is happening and the sound of silence resona...

The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you. (Stephanie Perkins) Reading these pages you will be thinking what a thoroug...

The truth is in the middle of funny and serious. (Steve Coogan) If I had to write a ten-word slogan to entice people into umpiring, it would be this:  You can&#...

Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare. (Alfred Hitchcock). There is nothing like a Saturday League cricket appointm...

A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job. (Thomas Boswell) One of the reasons I starting writing Secret Umps was to entice ...

If you aren’t going all the way, why go at all? (Joe Namath) A few years ago I attended a talk by Paul Baldwin, an umpire on the First Class panel and one of th...