The no-nonsense, record-setting Aussie set for Lord's ton

Melbourne Cricket Ground. Tail-end of the 2009-10 summer. Australia are defending 127 in a T20I against Pakistan. A tick over 60,000 fans are in to watch Shaun Tait bowl rockets to Imran Farhat.

The first ball of Pakistan's chase sees a Tait loosener whoosh past Farhat's attempted cut. As the speedometer flashes up 156.3 kph, the bowler checks with the black-clad umpire that his front foot is sufficiently behind the line before flicking his eyes up to the speed being displayed on the big screen.

Rod Tucker, that black-clad umpire, keeps his expression neutral. He knows better than to get swept up in the emotion of a noisy crowd realising they might be about to witness a slice of history. A part of him is feeling it though.

"I remember Paul Reiffel was at square-leg," Tucker tells cricket.com.au. "We've looked at each other and gone, 'Geez, that is quick'."

Tait's next two deliveries are faster again. The second ball registers at 159kph. Tucker remains impassive – outwardly at least.  "The third ball of the over got over 160 and the crowd went mad," Tucker says. "Things like that stick in your memory."

Much has changed in cricket since that night at the MCG. Two things have not. Tait's record for the fastest ball bowled in a match in Australia is one. Another is Tucker as a no-nonsense adjudicator being entrusted to oversee the game's greatest moments.

At Lord's tonight (from 8pm AEST), he will become the first Australian umpire to stand in 100 Tests when he takes to the field for the England-New Zealand series opener.

Tucker makes no secret of the fact he prefers the noise of champagne corks being politely popped on a Test's first morning than the blare of a Friday-night T20I. "I really respect the history of the game," he says on the eve of his milestone match in north London. "It's really nice to have it here."

In fact, Tucker's path towards his second life in cricket after a 103-game first-class career with NSW and then Tasmania (which included seven first-class hundreds, the last of which came in a 319-run partnership with Ricky Ponting that remains a Tigers record) began in even calmer surrounds.

Having finished his professional career captain-coaching the short-lived Canberra Comets in Australia's domestic 50-over competition, the left-hand batter and right-arm medium pacer spent a final season playing grade cricket in Sydney for Gordon in 2001-02. He was struck by the disrespect shown by club players towards umpires.

"I just wondered if a former player was out there would they treat them the same?" he says. As he found out the following season when he started officiating those same players, they did not.

"You’ve then got to perform at a certain level to keep that respect," says Tucker, who within two seasons had progressed to umpiring first-class cricket. "But I did notice a difference, that's for sure.

"I did feel very comfortable from the start, having played for such a long time, to then just go out there on the cricket field, it still feels like your office.

"I didn't get into it to do international games. I got into it not even knowing it was going to be a career. I'd started doing it, and probably within three years I started realising, 'This is potentially going to be my career'."

By the end of the decade, Tucker was making his international umpiring debut in a 2009 T20I at the MCG, which was also David Warner's auspicious first outing for Australia. The corresponding game a year on, the one in which Tait topped the 160kph mark, was Steve Smith's first international.

Across 275 games over near-on two decades, Tucker has outlasted Warner and could do likewise with Smith. The official has been on the field for just as many memorable moments as those two era-defining compatriots, even if the bulk of them have occurred abroad or in games not featuring Australia due to the ICC's neutrality rules.

Having stood in for the 2013 Champions Trophy final to see England hearts break when India won a rain-marred contest at Edgbaston, Tucker then saw their blushes saved months later when Monty Panesar and Matt Prior narrowly avoided a series defeat by blocking out the final over of the 2014 Eden Park Test with their side nine wickets down.

He was front and centre for an even more affecting moment later that year in Sharjah when Brendon McCullum blazed a rapid double-ton days after the death of Philip Hughes.

Back at Eden Park in 2015, Tucker was officiating the World Cup semi-final the Kiwis won with a ball to spare thanks to the iconic Grant Elliott six off Dale Steyn, and then was in the television umpire's seat four years later when a boundary countback cruelly denied the Black Caps their maiden ICC trophy.

Given he has been there for so many of New Zealand's biggest moments, it is perhaps no surprise he singles that side out for praise – even if he takes some responsibility for their heartbreak at Lord's in the 2019 decider.

In the final over of that World Cup, England were awarded six runs after a ricochet off Ben Stokes' bat went for four overthrows as Stokes and Adil Rashid took a second run. It was later determined the batters had not crossed when Martin Guptill released his throw, meaning England should have only scored five runs with Stokes at the non-striker's end.

"We needed footage of where the batsmen were when the fielder released the ball for the overthrows, and we couldn't get it right then and there," Tucker says. "So the on-field umpires had to make the call on whether the guys had crossed when the ball was released by the fielder.

"That determined how many runs were scored. We couldn't get (the footage), so they just had to make a call on the field, and unfortunately they got that wrong. But that was an incredible game of cricket, and New Zealand are an incredible bunch of guys.

"You never heard them blame that – ever. They were so close to winning the World Cup, and they never once raised the fact that that was a wrong call. To me, that was respect for New Zealand cricket. They were incredible."

Tucker insists the technology that has become such a central feature of top-level cricket has not actually changed the initial decision-making process of an on-field umpire. Instead, he says, it often shifts focus away from officials and onto players' deliberating on whether to review. 

But he admits the real-time feedback on an incorrect decision can be crippling.

"Mentally, umpiring is a little bit like batting," he says. "If you're in-form you just feel like you're going to get it right. But we all know when you're batting, there's one around the corner that's going to have your name on it. Then you can quite easily get another one next game straight away.

"Umpiring is exactly the same. We will be going through a great period, and then sure enough, around the corner, there's two or three in a row that have just got your name on them. There are 50-50 calls you've got to make, and you can get all those wrong in a short space of time. That can be difficult to get your mindset back to being confident."

Tucker's capacity to forget, in the same way the best batters put a play-and-miss behind them instantly, is the envy of his colleagues. "Apparently I'm quite good at getting over errors," he says, adding with a laugh: "I don't know if that means I've made a lot of them."

His logic is simple. "Our decision-making percentage in a good year is around the 95 per cent (correct) mark," he says. "So I say to the guys that my mindset is that if I get one wrong, there's a good chance my next 19 are going to be correct."

The admiration Tucker's fellow umpires have for him is reflected by the efforts some have made to join his older brother Darren (who also briefly played for NSW in the late-1980s), his daughter Olivia and granddaughter Lottie in being at Lord's this week for his landmark match. 

The most laudable comes from Richard Kettleborough, who is expected to make a mad dash from Manchester on Friday after returning from officiating in the Pakistan-Australia ODI series in Lahore. Reiffel, despite not being one of the appointed officials for the England-NZ series, has travelled from Australia to acknowledge his long-time partner's achievement.

"Things like that mean a lot to me, because for me, my peers are the greatest judges of your career," Tucker says. "The respect that I've got for a lot of them is (high). It's been one of the great things about umpiring, the people that I've met."

Among players, Andrew Strauss and Geoffrey Boycott both played their 100th Tests at Lord's. The only other umpire to notch their ton at the home of cricket was Rudi Koertzen, who was incidentally the other standing umpire when Tucker made his Test debut in Hamilton in 2010 – a week after seeing Tait eclipse the 160kph mark – for a NZ-Bangladesh game.

Koertzen (who finished on 108 Tests), Steve Bucknor (128) and Aleem Dar (145) are the only men now ahead of Tucker among the most-capped Test umpires. Last year he went past Darryl Hair's Australian record of 95 Tests. He has also done the maths on how much longer he would need to go on for to break Dar's record.

So, could he get there?

"Easy answer – no," laughs Tucker. "That'd take another six or seven years. I don't want to go that long. His record will stand for a long time, because it looks like moving forward there might not be as much Test cricket played.

"I hope that's not right. I think it's the most precious game we've got."