Keith Dibb: He watched Sir Donald Bradman bat as a boy and he is still umpiring today at 90

Keith Dibb was 13 when he sneaked into Headingley and watched Don Bradman bat. He is still turning up to cricket grounds 77 years later and the players he runs into cannot quite believe it either.

Keith Dibb: Britain's oldest cricket umpire

There is a man in Leeds who packs his white umpire's coat when he goes on holiday, not because he forgets to leave it behind but because he knows that somewhere in Australia or New Zealand or Barbados there will be a cricket match and the possibility of officiating one is not something he is willing to miss through lack of preparation.

His name is Keith Dibb and he is 90 years old and this weekend he began his 75th consecutive season as a cricket umpire making him the oldest and longest-serving official in Britain by a distance that no one is close to challenging.

He has stood in more than a thousand matches. Keith Dibb has survived two shoulder operations and a knee replacement, and then a second knee replacement, and each time the surgery was finished he put his whites back in the bag and went back to the ground.

When he recently spent four days at Headingley watching county cricket he ran into people he had not seen in two decades and their reaction to his presence told the whole story, bloody hell are you still about was the greeting he received and he found it wonderful and so do the rest of us when we hear it.

It started because he was always batting at number eleven and needed something useful to do

Keith Dibb's relationship with cricket began in North Yorkshire when he was 13 years old and joined his local side. His own assessment of his batting abilities was honest, he was usually number eleven which meant long periods of watching rather than playing and at some point watching turned into officiating and officiating turned into a vocation that has now lasted 75 years.

The moment that crystallised his love for the game came when Keith Dibb sneaked into Headingley as a teenager and watched Don Bradman score an unbeaten 173 for Australia.

He was 6 foot 4 inches tall and people frequently mistook him for a police officer on the field which occasionally came in useful, though he did once have to call the actual police when a player refused to leave the field after being sent off under ECB regulations and the situation escalated to the point where the man was being grabbed by the throat by the incoming batsmen who had been waiting with their pads on.

The police arrived with their lights on within five minutes and told Keith Dibb they had always assumed cricket was a gentleman's game. He told them it was. He reported the player to the league and had him banned. He has met a lot of smashing people over the years and a few difficult ones and he says the wonderful ones have always vastly outnumbered the other kind.

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At 90 with two replaced knees he is now mentoring the next generation and still telling them the same thing

The second knee replacement was the thing that finally prompted the Leeds league to suggest a change of role.

They did not want him to get hurt by a fast-moving ball and the conversation ended with Keith transitioning from active umpire to mentor, showing the next generation of officials the ropes and passing on the accumulated knowledge of 75 years standing in the middle of cricket matches across four countries.

He takes the role with the same seriousness he brought to the officiating itself and the message he still delivers to players at the start of every game is the one he has always delivered, let's have a good game in a friendly spirit.

Keith Dibb worked with the legendary Dickie Bird for 14 years through his foundation and the relationship between the two men produced at least one moment of genuine comedy when Keith gave Dickie out in a charity match after the ball struck him while running between wickets and Dickie's reaction was approximately what you would expect from a man who had spent his career on the other side of that finger.

His wife of 59 years used to stand beside him at matches making teas and he lost her to coronavirus and he carries that loss with him. But the whites are still packed and the season has started and Keith Dibb at 90 years old is still showing up to cricket grounds in Yorkshire and the game is better for it in a way that no statistic about a thousand matches quite captures.