July 28, 2026

SuperSport Park played host to a different kind of occasion on Wednesday evening, as the cricketing community gathered not for a match, but to celebrate a life spent entirely within the game.

The evening marked the official launch of Cricket in an Umpire’s Orbit: Marais Erasmus, the Rock ‘n Roll Years, the new biography on one of the sport’s most respected umpires, written by acclaimed cricket writer Telford Vice and published by Naledi.

The evening opened with a welcome address from Titans Cricket Chief Executive Dr Jacques Faul, who set the tone for what would become a warm and reflective night. Dr Faul spoke of the importance of pausing to celebrate the people who give so much of themselves to the game, noting that a career of the length and standard achieved by Marais Erasmus is precisely the kind that deserves to be recognised and told.

At the heart of the evening was a panel discussion, led by Tinus van Staden, sports editor at Rapport, who was joined on stage by both author Telford Vice and the man himself, Marais Erasmus. Van Staden opened proceedings by putting Erasmus’s extraordinary career into perspective for the room, reminding guests that this was a man who played 107 matches as a professional cricketer before going on to officiate in more than 700 professional matches as an umpire.

Telford Vice spoke candidly about what drew him to Erasmus as a subject. He described him as a solid individual, someone completely unshakeable as a human being, and said that quality was precisely what made him such a compelling person to write about.

For his part, Erasmus reflected on the process of putting his story on paper. He explained that he and Vice had worked together to shape a structure for the book built around what they believed readers would genuinely want to know, admitting that there had simply been too many stories to fit within its pages. His hope, he said, is that the book inspires many more young people to choose the path of cricket, in whatever form that may take, just as the game had shaped the whole of his own life.

The conversation also took a personal turn as Erasmus reminisced about the players who left the greatest impression on him over the course of his career. He named Jacques Kallis as his favourite player of all, having had the privilege of sharing a field with him, and also looked back fondly on facing the pace of Dale Steyn during his own playing days in domestic cricket , a reminder that long before the white coat, Erasmus was very much a cricketer in his own right.

It was a fitting tribute to a man who has given so much of himself to South African cricket, and a reminder, in the words of the evening’s host, that careers like his do not come along often – and are all the better for being celebrated while they can still be shared first-hand.