Shep

David Shepherd runs his village post office in Devon. He gets up before six o'clock every day and walks around the village with his trolley delivering the village's newspapers. He is also the world's most senior and respected cricketing umpire. For more than twenty years he has umpired tests, county games and one day matches everywhere from Trinidad to Glamorgan, from Essex to Melbourne. He has given Geoff Boycott out, resisted appeals from Curtley Ambrose, dodged straight drives from Sachin Tendulkar, calmed down Shane Warne and signalled leg-byes in his own uniquely elegant and justly famous style. His experience of umpiring spans three decades, the list of players he has umpired, known and counts as friends reads like a cricketing Who's Who, his knowledge of the game and his expertise is unrivalled. And he is held in rare esteem and affection by virtually everyone involved in cricket. Beginning with an evocative account of Sheperd's North Devon childhood the book will cover his entire career beginning with playing for Devon in the minor Counties League before joining Gloucester in 1965. He retired in 1979 and became an umpire the following year.
His time as an umpire has seen cricket become dominated by money, the introduction of floodlit games and of the controversial electronic 'third umpire', video evidence and world-wide match fixing scandals. The book will contain informed and trenchant opinions on all these aspects of cricket, past, present and future as well as a wealth of fascinating and amusing anecdotes from a man who has stayed at the centre of the game for nearly forty years, never losing his love of the game or his sense of humour.