Marais Erasmus, rock ’n roll umpire ― and now it’s all in a new book

Marais Erasmus had a decision to make. The evidence was closer to him than the usual 22 yards. There was nobody at square leg and no Decision Review System, but he didn’t need help to make up his mind. He knew what to do, he knew it was the right thing to do, and he knew it was the right time to do it.

As always, he wondered how no-one else could hear his heart thumping, see his veins thicken, and notice the hair on the back of his neck suddenly straighten. As always, his head was perfectly still, his eyes narrowed, bright and steady. His closed mouth was a downward curve, his slightly furrowed brow tipped a touch forward, his shoulders comfortably sloped, his sturdy figure calm and controlled.

What you see is not what you get with Erasmus. What you see is a picture of assured excellence, an idyll in a storm. There is an unusual elegance about him, as if he is dancing without moving. He looks like a man quietly contemplating the components of a sunset.

What you would get were you to be him when he has a decision to make is the sense of an unruly rabble of butterflies trying to alight onto the blades of a windmill spinning in a gale.

Calm? Not Erasmus. On the outside he could be a painting called still life with wide-brimmed hat. On the inside he is as rudely alive and kicking as a mad hatter.

The decision was made, in the usual way, with the minimum of visible fuss. In less time than it would have taken Erasmus to step towards the stumps and lift the bails, he walked to the desk, signed the form that lay on it, and left the office. Then he took a deep breath of what felt like freer air that promised a better, brighter future.

It was November 2007. For seven years Erasmus had juggled professional umpiring with teaching — he is a former deputy headmaster, which is obvious even now — and official unhappiness over his frequent absences from school had grown. Push had come to shove. He had taught Afrikaans, history and geography for 17 years. But now he had to choose: umpiring or educating?

Signing the form ended his teaching career a month later. By then he had officiated in 30 first-class matches — he made his debut in February 2003 — and 16 internationals — either on the field or behind a screen — across the formats. That moment in the headmaster’s office at Swartland Primary School in Malmesbury set Erasmus on a path he would step off in May 2024, when he hung up his proverbial white coat at international level.

Proverbial because umpires no longer wear white coats, and that’s the least of the changes that swept through the profession during Erasmus’s career. The surgical precision of modern television means umpires on the field in matches that are broadcast don’t decide any but the most obvious runout appeals. The same goes for stumping shouts and close calls on the boundary.

The art and craft of umpiring — in important ways it is about both — has undergone a quiet revolution since Erasmus was first paid to make decisions while remaining icy on the outside even as his fire burned within.

Behind him are more than two decades of becoming, and remaining, global cricket’s most recognisable official and its most trusted figure. South Africa’s supporters used to feel relief when they saw Jacques Kallis make his magisterial way to the wicket. Similarly, cricket-minded people everywhere are happy to see Erasmus step over the boundary. That assures them the match is in safe hands. At one end of the pitch, at least.

But that’s not universally true. Umpiring is a form of conflict resolution, hence umpires cannot satisfy all of the people all of the time. As a high-profile leader in his profession, Erasmus has made significant numbers of people unhappy a significant amount of the time in a significant number of countries.

Umpiring is also controversy management. Erasmus has been snared in more squabbles, on and off the field, than many umpires, largely because he has stood in more important matches than many of his peers. Upholding an appeal for timed out that was made against Angelo Mathews during the 2023 World Cup is only the last example in his stellar international career.

Erasmus won the David Shepherd Trophy, the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) recognition of the best umpire of the year, in 2016, 2017 and 2021. Pakistan’s Aleem Dar and Englishman Richard Kettleborough have also earned the award three times. Only Simon Taufel, an Australian who won the trophy five consecutive times from its inception in 2004, and England’s Richard Illingworth, the winner in 2019, 2022, 2023 and 2024, have done so more often.

Erasmus was appointed to the ICC’s Elite Panel in June 2010 and stood in the 2011, 2015, 2019 and 2023 editions of the men’s 50-over World Cup. He made it to the quarterfinals in 2011 and 2015, and in the latter he was the television official in the final. Four years later at Lord’s he was on the field and central to the drama that unfolded in the final, when a boundary count was needed to separate England and New Zealand. He was part of 11 versions of what is now called the T20 World Cup: eight men’s and three women’s.

Erasmus stood in 82 World Cup matches of all kinds — men’s and women’s, ODI and T20I — and Champions Trophy games, and was the television official in 31 more. He made it to seven finals on the field and another two on the box. He stood in nine quarter- and semifinals and kept his eyes on the screen in another five. That means he was entrusted with knockout games, either on the field or in the booth, in more than a fifth of his matches in ICC events.

The men’s Ashes? Fourteen Tests on the field — seven in each country — and eight as the third umpire in seven series spread across more than a dozen years.

Erasmus has been up close and personal with the most powerful entity in world cricket, India’s men’s team, in 26 Tests, as many one-day internationals (ODI) and nine T20 internationals (T20I). Seven of those matches have been the world game’s premier fixture: India versus Pakistan. One was the 2017 Champions Trophy final. He has been the television official in eight India Tests, 13 of their ODIs and five of their T20Is.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) has had the benefit of Erasmus’s services in 68 games on the field and 18 as the electronic arbiter. He stood in the 2018 final and was involved in three other playoff matches in 2016 and 2018.

I met Erasmus through a despotic war criminal who headed a family dictatorship business. It was the strange evening of March 28 2011 in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. Erasmus was there as part of the umpiring panel in that year’s men’s World Cup, which was played in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. I was there to report on the tournament.

Both of us had been invited, among other umpires and reporters, to dinner by “His Excellency Mahinda Rajapaksa, President of Sri Lanka”, who as prime minister had presided over the last four years of the country’s 25 years of brutal civil war. Shaking the hand of the not-at-all-great man was like clasping a dead but still poisonous fish. Trying to find meaning in his coldly glazed eyes or make sense of his raspy mumbling was beyond me. I would like to think Erasmus felt the same way, and so we didn’t stray far from each other until it was time to collect our phones from security and return to the more real world.

From there, we bumped into each other from time to time in our respective roles in cricket’s travelling circus. But it wasn’t until almost a dozen years later that the idea for this book was communicated. It was a dazzling summer’s day in January 2023 when Erasmus and I discovered we were in the same queue curling up a hill and waiting to get into a Mango Groove concert at Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town.

“I want to talk to you about a book,” he said. I was dead keen immediately. His wife, Adèle, seemed uneasy about the prospect of revisiting controversial episodes. “What would be the point of the book if we didn’t,” I said. He laughed, turned to Adèle, and said, “Did you hear that?”

But wait. Marais Erasmus? Mango Groove? Yes, the most stoic figure in cricket is keen on cheesy 1990s pseudo Afropop. That’s among the many things you might not know about him.

Neither could umpires be confused, you would think, with video game characters. Think again. If you go to Erasmus’s Wikipedia page you are informed that “‘M Erasmus’ redirects here. For the fictional wizard villain named ‘Merasmus’, see Team Fortress 2.” It’s a “multiplayer first-person shooter game” that was released in October 2007. Merasmus serves as an “antagonist of the game’s annual Halloween events” along with “the Horseless Headless Horsemann, Monoculus and the Bombinomicon”, all of them among the game’s “non-playable characters”. Unplayable, you might say, especially if you’re of the disposition to read a book about an umpire.

Not unlike war criminals and dictators, and indeed fictional wizard villains and those who find them unplayable, cricketers come and cricketers go. And they have their fans. Umpires tend to last longer, even though they don’t attract followings the size of cricketers’. They aren’t often former superstar players, but the best of them are the superheroes of cricket.

Their powers include being able to replicate, using nothing more than years of learning and training, their eyes and ears, and their gut feel, almost three-quarters of the findings of carefully calibrated machines — 72.8% of decisions made on the field are proved correct by DRS.

Umpires are also the rock and roll stars of cricket. As in what they used to say to television directors when staring at a crucial bit of footage, “Could you rock and roll that for me, please?” Erasmus was among the first to use that phrase, and he did so many times. So many times that a version of those words made a useful hook for hatching the title of this book.

Umpires are still more than superheroes and rock stars. They are required to maintain their equilibrium and impartiality come hell, high water or Virat Kohli screaming at you like a privileged poison pixie. Most umpires don’t have the kind of agendas players invariably do, which makes them fascinating interview subjects. It doesn’t hurt that they tend to be among the most colourful characters in cricket.

How far will electronic umpiring go? How do umpires feel when the gizmos tell them, and the millions watching at the ground and on television, they’ve got it wrong? What makes a player a pleasure or a pain to deal with from an umpire’s perspective? How do they hear themselves think in the clamour and orchestrated chaos of an IPL game?

Marais Erasmus is perfectly placed to answer these questions and others, and to do so with the warmth and humanity it would not be proper to show when he is on the field.

* Marais Erasmus: The Rock ’n Roll Years; Cricket in an Umpire’s Orbit by Telford Vice is available as an ebook from https://naledi.co.za/product/the-rock-n-roll-years/ and will be published in hardcopy on June 15.