Right there in the middle of Barnsley, South Yorkshire.

The greatest umpire ever known to man – or at least to a man who's never known Steve Bucknor – now stands bronze and glorious in his home town centre.

Flat cap on. Sweater round waist. Finger aloft.

I met him once. The man, not the statue. He was opening a betting shop and I was a wide-eyed reporter with the world at my notebook.

Dickie Bird. Start with a joke. Win him over. I cleared my throat and said he'd brought his usual weather with him. It was raining and the light was bad.

He wasn't amused. Neither was my news editor when I went back without a quote.

I'll laugh about this one day, I thought.

I don't hold it against Dickie, though. He's a living legend. Deserves that statue.

Good on Barnsley.

While lesser towns pay tribute to politicians and pop stars who claim to have been bigger than Jesus, this little backwater is setting its own trend and honouring a referee most famous for getting narky about a burst pipe.

Which got me thinking maybe Calderdale should do the same.

Yeah, yeah, we have Akroyd and Albert and probably some others which aren't worth caring about (answers in an abusive e-mail, perhaps) but where are the statues celebrating the district's real heroes?

You know the kind I mean.

Not Percy Shaw or Wainhouse, who you could argue have their own tributes visible everywhere anyway.

Not Eric Portman or Wilfred Pickles who are already honoured as well as any man can be; nor any of our Nobel Prize winners who have gongs and can give over being greedy by wanting more adoration.

Not William Wordsworth who wasn't born here, nor Ted Hughes who was born here but did barely anything else.

And not Bernard Ingham or John Henry Whitley who both worked in politics and could have sorted their own statues out and stuck it on expenses if they were that bothered.

Which means there's only three real options – and I'm a modest man so I'll exclude myself from the running.

Which in turn means it has to be either Shirley Crabtree, aka Big Daddy, who could be stood in stone, perhaps ripping the face mask from a stunned Kendo Nagasaki, just outside Halifax Post Office, or maybe weatherman John Kettley permanently predicting rain in Bramsche Square, Todmorden.

But, then, Dickie Bird wouldn't be happy with that last one. He's seen more rain than any man should, and I don't want to upset him again.

Big Daddy then?

As the man himself would have said, Easy, Easy, Easy.

colin.drury@halifaxcourier.co.uk