Know Your Match Officials: Andy Pycroft
As a cricketer, Andy Pycroft had to play all his life as an amateur. But the 61-year-old now finds himself in a professional cricket role that can be very demanding.
A member of the Emirates Elite Panel of ICC Match Referees, his days at the cricket ground are mostly spent in front of the laptop. The former lawyer, who played three Tests and 20 ODIs for Zimbabwe, completed 150 ODIs as a match referee during the recent New Zealand-West Indies series while he has also officiated in 56 Tests and 61 T20Is.
The genial former lawyer’s sense of humour is evident as he describes his memories as a cricketer and then about his initiation into match refereeing.
Asked about his recollections of playing in ICC Cricket World Cups – he played in the 1983, 1987 and 1992 editions – he remembers his batting debacle in the last of his three tournaments when he failed to get a run in two appearances in Hobart and Kapil Dev’s unbeaten 175 against Zimbabwe in 1983 as the obvious ones. ̣
He hastens to add Zimbabwe’s big achievement when they pulled off a shock win against Australia in their first ever ICC Cricket World Cup match in the same tournament.
“I played as an amateur in the day when Duncan Fletcher was captaining us. There was only one professional - David Houghton – the Flower brothers (Andy and Grant) joined after that. I was a lawyer by profession, so I am working during the day and practicing in the evenings and then playing without getting paid. When you play as an amateur, there is a totally different perspective of the game but I enjoyed it. It was a nice balance between the profession and sport,” says Pycroft.
He feels his stints as selector and coach have helped him develop as a match referee.
“You get experience on every aspect of the game. So if you are doing commentary, you are doing coaching, you get a balance for all those things. So the more things you do in the game, the more experience you get, the better you can serve as a match referee,” says the former batsman.
He says he became a match referee “pretty much by accident” on the suggestion of umpire Russell Tiffin when Pycroft mentioned that he “did not want to do law anymore.”
Ask him how his first day at work was and he has you in raptures. He describes how he had to borrow a laptop with his own machine giving way on the eve of the Lord’s Test between England and the Windies in 2009 and then how he got locked in a bathroom on the morning of the match and the door had to be broken down.
He calls that a “hair-raising morning” and credits third umpire Ian Gould for getting him through it.
Pycroft though asserts he does not remember too many performances on the field from his time as a match referee.
“Nothing stands out unless there is a code of conduct (breach)……or something extraordinary has happened. So if you are talking about which game was where - I will have to give a lot of thought to remember,” he says.