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BATHURST umpire Graham Glazebrook has been rewarded for a stellar 12 months after being given the Kevin Pye Medal by New South Wales Country Cricket recently.
The award is given to the best performing umpire from the state’s regional areas, and Glazebrook was announced as its 2015-16 winner at the NSW Cricket Umpires and Scorers Association presentation.
Over the past season the Bathurst official stood in a multitude of local first grade matches and Western Zone representative fixtures along with Country Championship matches, Sydney first grade games and two games in the Regional Bash.
He also got the chance to officiate in the middle of the Sydney Cricket Ground in the final of the Sydney Thunder conference of the Regional Bash.
It was a landmark summer by any measure.
“The award is judged mostly on the representative games that I did, and decided on by the New South Wales Country panel. The local stuff is taken into consideration as well,” Glazebrook explained.
“I got to do some pretty big games, the Southern Division Country Championships, the tournament final in Newcastle, a couple of preliminary rounds of the Regional Bash and then the Thunder conference final. That was the sort of thing I’ll never forget.
“Part of the assessment is through the feedback forms that the captains fill out after the matches, but on top of that, they have assessors and observers who watch the big matches and look for things that you might get a bit wrong.
“It isn’t like playing where you can tell exactly how you’re going by looking at a scorebook, it is always hard to tell whether you’re doing a good job.
“Invariably there’ll be 11 players who are happy and 11 who aren’t at the end of a game and no batsman has ever been caught behind or out LBW if you ask them,” he joked.
While standing in big matches has become something of a regular affair for Glazebrook, there was one contest in particular which came as a highlight for him in the build-up to last summer’s Big Bash League.
“I did a game where the Sydney Sixers played a Sydney Cricket XI at Drummoyne Oval,” he explained.
“There were some fantastic players there, the Sixers were basically at full strength so they had players like Johan Botha, Doug Bollinger and Nic Maddinson all there. To have players of that quality right in front of you is a fantastic experience.
“We’ve been lucky as umpires in Bathurst to have [Sheffield Shield umpire] Tony Wilds around us. Even as far as he’s gone, he still finds time to be the president of the local umpires association and has been great with his advice and just being available to discuss different things.”