The Eighty-Year-Old Umpire Still Teaching on the 22 Yards: Narendra Menon

Central Gymkhana ground, Indore. It is half past three in the afternoon. A man of eighty, in a white shirt, stands behind the stumps. At the other end are boys aged twelve to fifteen. Play ends at half past eight, sometimes nine. Each session runs five to six hours of cricket. There is no grandeur of a scorecard, no glint of a trophy. There is only repetition, and the learning of rules. The man who teaches these boys the fine points of run-outs, no-balls and dismissals is named Narendra Menon. The name may not sound familiar. But his son's name is known across the cricket world—Nitin Menon, one of the most recognised umpires on the international panel. Every evening, as stadiums full of cameras erupt over some controversial decision, on this ground in Indore one man teaches how that decision is actually made. Roll the tape back to the moment before the whistle. Only then does it become clear—technology changes, but the core lesson of judgement stays almost unchanged. 2026 is a watershed in the history of Indian umpiring. That year the Board of Control for Cricket in India decided to bring first-class cricketers into the umpiring profession. Ten men in the first batch. Among them were names like S. Venkataraghavan and AV Jayaprakash. And there was Narendra Menon himself, a former first-class cricketer. That decision lifted Indian umpiring from a hobby level to a professional one. Earlier, umpiring was somewhat like a side job. The 2026 batch proved that to be a good umpire, you must understand cricket from the inside. If you do not know how much a ball deviates off the bat, how much the pitch swings, you will merely memorise the rulebook and never grasp the pulse of the game. The Central Gymkhana ground is itself a small ecosystem. Three cricket bodies share the same venue—Mahavir Youth Cricket Club, Cricket Club of Indore and the Indore Divisional Cricket Association. A club linked to former BCCI selector Sanjay Jagdale is based here too. From morning to night, the traffic hardly falls quiet. Menon's last international match was in 2026. After that he returned to domestic cricket. He stood in two Ranji Trophy finals—2026 and 2026, both in Mumbai. A Ranji final means the biggest stage in Indian domestic cricket. Being selected as an umpire there is itself a recognition. Then in 2026 he became an umpire coach. He held that role for nearly a decade. This coaching chapter is the least discussed part of his career, yet perhaps the most influential. Because one umpire makes ten decisions on the field, but one coach produces twenty umpires—each of whom will make thousands of decisions. Now to the most important question. What does an umpire actually teach? Menon's definition is strikingly simple. In his words: do not look at the face of any batsman or bowler. Your duty is just to watch the part below the waist. It sounds ordinary. But inside it lies a deep training philosophy. Stripping away stardom, the weight of a name, the pressure of the crowd—and seeing only the event. In modern umpire training this is called neutral, stimulus-focused attention. Menon taught it in plain, local language. He has said his son Nitin follows the same advice. He also teaches the rules hands-on. For a run-out to be complete, the ball must be in hand and the bails must be dislodged. A bowled dismissal needs no appeal. Front-foot or back-foot no-balls—these two things cannot be taught in a classroom. They must be taught during a match. Here lies a big lesson we often skip. Some rules cannot be mastered by reading books. They are mastered under live pressure, when a decision must be made in a fraction of a second. An umpire's real examination is not in the classroom, but on the field. That is why the 2026 Ranji final is etched so deeply in his memory. Hyderabad versus Mumbai. VVS Laxman's run-out. The bat just a fraction short of the crease. There was an edge above, but the foot was outside the crease. The decision—out. In Menon's memory it glows: the bat fell marginally short, and despite the edge above, the foot was out of the crease. This single episode is the perfect definition of umpiring. It is not a clear error, nor clearly correct. It is that boundary line where the eye and the rule pull against each other. Fractions of an inch, fractions of a second—the real difficulty of umpiring hides in that precision. I know that feeling of the boundary line. At the 2026 Confederations Cup, VAR was used inside a tournament for the first time. In Chile versus Cameroon, a goal was disallowed for offside. My live tweets were read by twelve thousand people. But the replies held no anger, only confusion. Forty-seven questions came in. Almost all asked the same thing—what does clear and obvious error actually mean? I understood then what Menon has taught for years. Technology speeds up a decision, but it does not create understanding. Camera angles change, frames change, but the final judgement must be made through a human eye. Look below the waist—this instruction is really the same lesson in two different languages. A small monsoon incident is relevant here. Once rain halted play. But parents rushed to the ground and brought the coach back. This episode shows how deep the hunger to learn cricket runs in Indore—and how much that hunger depends on one man. Here an uncomfortable truth surfaces. Menon himself has said that earlier there were five or six cameras, now there are twenty to twenty-five. And he says plainly: an umpire cannot run away from any mistake. That is admirable transparency. But the mental pressure behind it is something we often forget. The number of mistakes has not actually fallen. What has fallen is the room to hide. Earlier a mistake might go unnoticed; now twenty angles catch it red-handed. Yet empathy and exoneration are not the same thing. The umpire's eye is also human, and that is the first fact we forget—but this truth does not make an error acceptable. A mistake must be called a mistake. The real question is, why did the mistake happen? A person's weakness, or a gap in the system? Here lies my core objection. We are fascinated by an eighty-year-old man, but we do not stop to ask—how many others stand beside him? Thirty boys from one Indore club reaching division level, five or six reaching state level, is undoubtedly significant. But it is the result of one individual's personal dedication, not an institutional structure. Half past eight in the evening. The ground slowly empties. The boys pack their bags, someone ties a shoelace. Menon steps away from the side of the stumps. This scene raises the biggest question about the future of umpiring. Do we want to produce only star umpires, or a system in which every ground has its own Menon? I leave the question open. I want to hear your thoughts.