Photo Credit: New Zealand Cricket
As the pages turned towards the end of the 2023/24 cricket season, it was also the final chapter on the field for one of New Zealand’s most respected and long-serving cricket umpires.
After 20 years of making the calls at the top level of the Domestic game, Tim Parlane, NZC Umpire cap number 560, has hung up his white coat.
The Plunket Shield match between the Wellington Firebirds and Otago Volts at the Cello Basin Reserve became his final fixture on the Domestic stage.
Originally from Auckland’s North Shore, Parlane made his umpiring debut in the 2003/04 summer, and finishes his career having stood in 130 first-class matches.
That’s the third highest tally for a New Zealand umpire, but there are also so many age-group matches, women’s ODi and T20 international matches, six Hawke Cup appointments and many other Domestic matches of one sort of another to which 66-year-old Parlane gave his service.
In men’s List A matches, he stood in 141 games from January 2002 until the end stages of this season’s Ford Trophy in Queenstown, as well as 29 women’s List A one-dayers, 107 men’s T20s and 27 women’s T20s.
Tim is the younger brother of Perry Parlane who played 80 games for Auckland Rugby in the 1970s and was an outstanding schoolboy cricketer at Takapuna Grammar.
Their brother Ross, a stalwart of the North Shore Cricket Club and NZC Sir Jack Newman award winner for outstanding service to cricket in the community, also umpired cricket at women’s Hansells Cup level in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Read more about Tim Parlane’s career here | on.nzc.nz/3x9bNoO
The New Zealand national cricket team, known as the Black Caps, made their Test debut in 1930 against England in Christchurch, becoming the fifth nation to play Test cricket. After waiting 26 years for their first Test win against the West Indies in 1956, they also played their first ODI in 1972–73 against Pakistan. New Zealand are the inaugural World Test Championship champions (2021) and have won the ICC Champions Trophy (2000). They have reached the Cricket World Cup final twice and the T20 World Cup final once.
