Simon Taufel shares sledging stories with students in Nagpur

NAGPUR: The appetite of cricket lovers to get into the intricacies of sledging is unfathomable.
One of the most successful umpires in the cricket history - Simon Taufel - revealed an incident where India's Munaf Patel and England's Owais Shah were involved in a heated exchange during 2006 Test match at Wankhede Stadium when the Australian was officiating.
Pointing out at the photograph of that very moment of the Test match, Taufel approached one of the students in the large gathering at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology auditorium, and asked him, "What did Munaf say?" "May be a few bad words," pat came the reply from the student."Which bad words?" Taufel was quick to ask.
Taufel's counter-question evoked a loud laughter and huge round of applause from the crowd. Not waiting for the student to answer, Taufel himself revealed, "Munaf said 'Saala ch***a' to Shah." The hindi slang in Australian accent called for louder laughter from 700-odd students, who had gathered to listen to Australian umpire who was the keynote speaker during the Annual Entrepreneurship Summit, Consortium'19 on Sunday.
Using the sledging incident, he told the students the importance of foundation of knowledge and foundation of knowing one's craft. "One of the things I learned as a cricket umpire was I got to know good words in local language. Now, I know bad words in seven different language. It helped me a lot in dealing with on-field incidents," said Taufel.
"Same applies to your (students') career. You got to have your foundation strong," advised Taufel, who had won five consecutive ICC Umpire of the Year awards between 2004 and 2008.
Taufel, who is the youngest person to have received the ICC's Bronze Bails Award for umpiring in 100 ODIs, relived his umpiring career and used it to give many professional lessons to the august gathering, who will be hitting the job market after a year or so.
Referring to Aaron Finch's dismissal in 3rd ODI of ongoing India-Australia series in Ranchi, where ball tracker was not convincing, Taufel said, "sometime technology is not perfect either."
"Technology has changed the game forever," he stressed on to this. Knowing that there are future IT engineers in the setting, Taufel gave a classic lesson, "Technology should be simple. It should support us (what we do) and our purpose. But, it should not replace humans."
Speaking his heart out, Taufel confessed that being an umpire doesn't make one rich. "So, I will certainly advice you, when you are making a career choice, money should not be a driver. Money won't let you put in the hard work to be successful. It keeps you motivated for the short period of time," advised Taufel before the crowd erupted in appreciation.