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There are only players in the world to play World Cup as a part of team and later played the role of an Umpire.
World Cups are the most important ICC events for all the nations who compete in it, the ODI World Cup is hosted after every 4 year and T20 World Cups are usually hosted within a gap of 2 years but last decade we saw a gap of more years due to covid.
Other than these events, there are the World Test Championship, Champions Trophy, and Asia Cup. The nations who have won the titles of these tournaments are- Australia, England, India, Pakistan, West Indies and Sri Lanka.
2 Players who played as a player and Umpire in World Cup
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Kumar Dharmasena – He is a Sri Lankan off-spinner and a middle-order batsman who played 172 matches for Sri Lanka in his career span of 1993-2004. He debuted at the age of 22-year-old for Sri Lanka as an off-spinner, his quickish deliveries made him a perfect spinner for playing in the ODI format, especially in Sri Lanka.
In his international cricket career, he took 207 wickets and made 2029 runs for Sri Lanka. In 1998 his action was doubted by the ICC and no sanctioned further to be allowed to bowl in an international match but Sri Lanka cleared these allegations in 2000 and continued to play mostly at his home Sri Lanka.
He was a part of the winning Sri Lankan squad in 1996, he took the wicket of Steve Waugh in the finals against Australia, and in the semi-final, he took the wicket of the skipper of Indian team M Azharuddin. He even had a better economy than M Murlitharan in the semis and quarters stage.
In November 2006, he retired from competitive cricket to pursue his career in umpiring. In 2009, he made his international umpiring debut. He was chosen to be an umpire for the 2011 Cricket World Cup in India. He was one of 18 umpires picked for the tournament. He umpired the first match of the World Cup between Bangladesh and India. Later that year, he was promoted to the top group of international umpires.
He was a part of the 2015 World Cup and 2019 World Cup when in the finals he gave one of the rarest signals of all time of 6 runs in an overthrow on the Ben Stokes end which led England to win the World Cup title of 2019.
Richard Illingworth – He was part of England’s squad in the 1992 World Cup played against Pakistan. He took the wicket of Javed Miandad with his slow left-arm orthodox bowling and was the last hope of England while batting against Pakistan in the finals.
Richard took his first test wicket on the first delivery itself, selectors saw him as a potential regular player for the team and he became a part of the shorter format. He played for Worcestershire in the vitality county championships where he was their stagnant 8th no. batsman and even made three centuries as a nightwatchman.
In his span of cricket career from 1991-1996, he took forty-nine wickets for England and made one hundred and ninety-six runs to the contribution from his end for the team.
After being dropped continuously from the squads, he decided to further pursue a career in umpiring where in 2006 he was appointed in the list of first-class umpires. Recently in the 2023 World Cup final between India and Australia, he was an on-field umpire along with Richard Kettlebrough.
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