Slow death – memoirs of a cricket umpire

With Slow Death Rudi Koertzen joins the small but growing number of umpires who have published autobiographies. Generally these are not the most memorable pieces of cricket literature, although that is not to say that they necessarily achieve poor sales. Umpires are faced with two major difficulties when it comes to setting their lives down in writing.

Slow death – memoirs of a cricket umpire: The title takes the reader

The first, increasingly significant, is that they dip in and out of individual series. Rudi has never umpired a full series, and no one is likely to again. Poor old Rudi could and did find himself umpiring on different continents in successive matches and this lack of continuity prevents the writing of a conventional cricketing biography.

The other major problem is that the better an umpire performs the less he is noticed. As Rudi never played cricket to a high standard, and has lived a relatively unremarkable life, he swiftly gets through his first four decades. As an outsider looking in I would have liked to have known more about life with apartheid, and then without it, but Rudi is not a man to court controversy and we learn little about that.

He then runs through some of the Tests and ODIs that he stood in over the years. The best chapter in the book is that dealing with match fixing.