Rules and Regulations

The more aerodyte among you may know that the word “Umpire” comes from the Latin, “Um” meaning to hesitate, and “Pire” which loosely translates as a stake upon which people are burnt. When Umpiring it is important to keep this in mind at all times as no matter what people say, they will take it personally when you give them out LBW, even if at the time they are quite clearly more fruit than man.

The life of an Umpire is not an easy one and requires years of training in order to learn, understand and apply the rules of Cricket correctly. One of the trickiest to master is “Duckworth-Lewis”. As everyone knows this is some new-age, tree huggin hippie way of making it virtually impossible for the team chasing a target to win the game. Devised by the statistician Huey Duckworth Lewis, the equation has successfully stumped every mathematician, cricket expert and fan of the chasing team since its arrival. Luckily however John Nash was finally able to crack the equation during the late 1990’s before it eventually drove him crazy.

First, take the amount of runs scored by the opposing team and add the number of pints Dan drank the night before plus the average pie consumption per Casual at lunch. Secondly, divide the amount of balls bowled by the defending team by the number of times Goughy called the opposition a c**t, multiplied by the amount of people hiding behind the pavilion or pretending to be on their phone so they don’t get asked to umpire. Thirdly, pull four random numbers out of a hat, add them together then subtract the amount of people who fell asleep watching Shakey bat. Finally, multiply the whole thing by the number of times Kim’s been dropped while batting and raise to the power of how many people have actually stuck around to figure the bastard out.

In most cases however the Casuals implement their own, “Lets just flip a sodding coin” method so we can all bugger off to the pub.