"You're A Good Umpire": Simon Taufel Recalls Sachin Tendulkar's Words After Giving Him Out Wrongly

Simon Taufel was a calm head and a young umpire who retired young. In fact, he was the youngest to officiate 100 ODIs in history of cricket. He had no intentions of becoming of an umpire but incidentally agreed to friend who wanted to take up the course. Simon Taufel was one of those umpires who did not gave wrong decisions too often but one such incident broke out against Sachin Tendulkar.

It was during the 2007 Test at Trent Bridge, in a match between India and England, Tendulkar was batting on 91 when he shouldered arms to a delivery from Paul Collingwood and Taufel gave him out. Tendulkar was left is disbelief as he took some time to leave the crease. The hawkeye showed that the ball was missing the off-stump.

Taufel recalled the conversation he had with Tendulkar the next day morning, where he admitted his mistake. “The following morning I happened to pass by Sachin on my normal morning walk out to the middle […] and I come across Sachin and I said, ‘look, yesterday I got it wrong, you know? I’ve looked at it, I got it wrong.’ He said, ‘look, Simon, I know.’ He said, ‘you’re a good umpire, you don’t often get many wrong, it’s okay, don’t worry about it.’

“And out of that sort of exchange, which wasn’t an apology for the sake of making him feel better or me feel better, it was just an acknowledgment that we were both out there doing our best. This is sport, and I wanted to acknowledge that I knew the fact that he was unhappy, and I was doing my best to make sure that that didn’t happen again. That was really the underlying message,” Simon Taufel told Gaurav Kapur on 22 Yarns.

It was an one-off incident in his career. Taufel clinched the top umpire honours for five times in a row. In 2006, he was ranked second only behind Darrell Hair for his accuracy in decision making.

After stepping down from the elite panel of umpires, he took up a role as Umpire Performance and Training Manager.