DON BRADMAN OF UMPIRING
After quitting cricket at 23 with depression he’s tried semi-pro football, working in a pie factory and chasing thieves out of his dad’s sports shop. Now Michael Gough’s found his calling as the...
THE Don Bradman of umpiring, as Mike Atherton cast him this summer, is considering the most obvious question — why is he so good?
Sitting at the kitchen table of his Hartlepool home, rather than standing behind the stumps at Old Trafford or the Ageas Bowl, Michael Gough’s trademark deliberation is just the same.
He may be slightly embarrassed by the subject, but with a phenomenal record of just five of his 70 reviewed decisions overturned this year — a success rate of 93 per cent that makes him the best umpire in the world — Gough has some explaining to do.
Finally, he answers. ‘I read a lot about top sportsmen and their one-per-cent gains, the small margins that make a big difference,’ begins the 40-year-old, in his first interview since emerging as one of the stars of the summer.
‘One example — every morning, I drop these little reactions balls on the hotel room floor. They fly off in different directions and I follow them, over and over. Your eyes are muscles, you should use and improve them.’
Non-neutral umpires were temporarily allowed this summer to avoid excess travel and Gough — well respected abroad but rarely seen in this country — stood in six England Tests versus West Indies and Pakistan and a one-day international against Australia.
‘It was an unbelievable thrill to umpire England but you have a job to do,’ he says. ‘All I see is a wooden bat and little red ball. I’m there to make the right decision.’
So good is Gough that India head coach Ravi Shastri once said they did not review his decisions because they knew he was right.
There must, then, be more to it than a healthy heart and beady eyes? ‘In my little book I have PNO scribbled down,’ he says. ‘That is: Process Not Outcome. You always want to give yourself as much time as possible, try to replay in your head everything that has just happened.
‘But sometimes you quickly have to gauge body language. The slips, you can tell if it’s a genuine appeal. The batsman, too. Is he staring at you with “kill” written all over his face? A lot of decisions are an educated guess, it has to be, and luck does come into it.’
Luck does not explain the numbers that make Gough so superior to his peers. Here’s another secret. ‘I stand in the nets a couple of days before and get used to player traits. Like Jofra Archer, who comes up to the crease quite relaxed but can send it down at 90mph — that tests your eyes! I try to see every player.’
It helps, agrees Gough, that he is a former player — an England Under-19 captain, no less. But there is an authority about him and he is funny, too. And players will like that. His dad, Michael Snr, joins us and cannot help but chip in with statistics and detail.
That’s a great help for a journalist, but Michael Jnr counters: ‘All right, Dad, you’ll get your chance for an interview at the end.’
His dad was thrilled by Atherton’s Bradman analogy. What about the recipient? ‘They’re lovely words, aren’t they?’ he says. ‘But you’re only one match away from a howler.’
Michael Snr has with him an extensive collection of scrapbooks of his son, from schoolboy to man, each of them lovingly and obsessively collated.
The newspaper cuttings begin as junior league snippets but, before long, Gough is on the back pages, smashing centuries for Durham. In 2002, aged 22, he averaged above 50 and was among the top ten batsmen in England.
Then, the cricket coverage stops. He has been asked a million times and still shakes his head when answering the question: why?
‘Honestly, the last year of cricket I enjoyed was at 16,’ he says. ‘Once I was in the Durham academy, I just didn’t feel the same, and I kept that from my family. It was weird. I’m thinking: “Lads would give their right arm to be where I am”. They were talking about me playing for England, the next Mike Atherton.
‘But I knew I had to quit to be happy. I left Durham with one year still on my contract. I was 23. It was scary. I had a big profile and people just couldn’t fathom it.
‘When I was 20 a doctor told me I had clinical depression. For six weeks we hid it behind a back injury. Come the end, it was a relief to be out of it. I was at peace.’
Michael Snr has just listened to his son relive a tortured decision that would perhaps, for some proud parents, be a source of disappointment.
But he says: ‘I was much more concerned about his welfare and happiness. All you want is your children to be happy. But he always said to me: “Whatever I do next, Dad, I’ll not let you down”.’
What he did next, in fact, was ask for some shifts at his dad’s sports shop in Hartlepool.
‘I was back in the real world,’ he says. ‘You’re chasing thieves and kicking druggies out. It was an eye-opener, something I hadn’t had as a cricketer.’
He picked up a few quid playing for Hartlepool Cricket Club, got his taxi licence and got a job in a pie factory.
‘I was putting the crusts on,’ he says. ‘But you tried to talk to the person next to you and they’d look as if to say: “Have you finished that pie yet or not?”. I lasted two hours and walked out!’
What he did have the bottle for was a shot at professional football. That may sound fanciful, but within the scrapbooks are letters from Arsenal inviting a 13-year-old Gough for a trial, where he met a fellow young hopeful named Michael Owen.
He recalls them sharing a McDonalds and eating cake on Owen’s birthday.
‘He was brilliant,’ Gough says, ‘although maybe I made him look good at centre-half!’
A decade on, he was ready to rekindle his boyhood dream.
‘I went through the divisions pretty quickly and scouts were coming to see me every week. I was commanding, I was loving it.’
From Horden in the 12th tier Wearside League to Barrow of the Conference North. ‘Ah, Barrow… an absolutely unmitigated disaster!’ he says. ‘We were 3-0 down at half-time on my debut. I was a shambles. The manager dragged me off. I thought, “Maybe football isn’t for me after all”.’
And so back to the family business. It was there, though, that he made a decision that would, in time, take him to the top of the world’s umpiring ranks and, last summer, elevation to the ICC Elite Panel of just 12 members. He takes us back to the Ashes of 2005. ‘I was watching the cricket and thought: “God, I miss being involved… what about umpiring?”.’ Gough’s first match was Bishop Auckland 3rds v Sedgefield 3rds.
‘Yeah, the big one,’ he says. ‘I was wearing one of those long, old-fashioned white coats — I looked like a butcher! I was getting £16 plus a bit of tea and my petrol money. But I thought, “Oh wow, how good is this?”. I absolutely loved it.’