Pringle: Dropped catches are such a drag for England
Hands down the best catcher of a cricket ball I have ever seen is Mark Waugh. The Australian Test batsman played for Essex when I was still a member of the team and watching the ball soundlessly nestle into his hands at slip was to witness a minor wonder of the world.
Keith Fletcher used to call it catching flies but given the timing, reactions, grace and natural talent involved it seemed greater than that.
It is widely regarded that catching a cricket ball well relies on two things: a predatory instinct, which most human beings possess; and practice, which professional cricketers do ad nauseum. It therefore comes as something of a puzzle then, that the current England team should shell 15 catches in the recent four-match Test series against Pakistan, most of them in the slip cordon.
Not that their opponents were immune with opportunities squandered in almost equal number.
Practice, and lots of it, is one of the pillars of coach culture – based on the Malcolm Gladwell theory that enough of it, at least 10,000 hours-worth, will make you expert in whatever you have been practising. Except, that with catching, as in the taking of penalties in football, it is impossible to replicate the match situation that throws them up – in the case of penalties the one-on-one intensity and pressure; in catching, the hours of longueurs before a chance is suddenly sprung upon you.
You can practise the techniques involved in catching but not, it seems, the concentration required to be a safe pair of hands. Fielders are now told to get into the habit of switching their concentration on an off – on when the bowler gets into his gather and switching off once the ball has hit the wicketkeeper’s gloves.Yet, that is still not ‘reality’. To match that, you would have to hang around most of the day for a few catches at best, hardly an efficient use of any one’s time.
If everyone is in the same boat are coaches under pressure to come up with something new? Not really, but they should be. Modern players, unlike their counterparts before central contracts, play hardly any county cricket once their England commitments start, so are starved of the conditions that see them spend long hours in the field.
Whereas Graham Gooch and Ian Botham would go back to county cricket between Tests, today’s players either rest or practise when they are not playing Tests.
And those practices, at least the fielding ones, tend to be short, sharp and intense, the very opposite of a match situation.
Waugh always looked a complete natural in everything he did but he’d still been coached, to a degree, in how to catch. His principal teacher, at both New South Wales and with Australia, had been Bobby Simpson, one of the greatest slip catchers in history.
Simpson’s big thing was to relax the
hands and move them as little as possible when intercepting the ball.
His techniques would seem to be a basic observation of Newton’s Laws of Motion, that if you want to ensnare a five and one half ounce sphere travelling towards you in a parabola at speed (anywhere between 45-95 mph), with your hands, you don’t want those hands to be moving too fast otherwise they would intensify the collision, at least in terms of the energy generated.
To help minimise the impact of that you would also want to catch the ball in the soft part of the palm and fingers and not the hard bits around the base of the thumb and hand or the tops of the fingers.
Anything striking those parts risks a hard bounce with the ball rebounding from your grasp.
Indeed, I can recall Sussex players speaking in reverential tones about Paul Parker’s abilities as a ground fielder though they always qualified it by saying that he dropped more catches than he should have done due to having hard hands.
Perhaps coaches should check the nature of players’ hands before deciding their role in the field, placing only those with the fleshiest pads in the slips.
Waugh probably never needed to think about it in those terms but he had “soft” hands that would quickly dampen any potential energy the edged catch might have. He also possessed superb reactions which meant he never looked hurried, lending him a graceful, no-nonsense air few if any slip fielders have matched since.
Of course, he was not immune from shelling the odd chance, though when it happened there was the kind of widespread disbelief among team mates and supporters that only occurs when a law of nature has been broken.
England’s fielders did not only drop slip catches against Pakistan, though they were the most numerous. In the final Test at the Kia Oval, Steven Finn put down a simple-looking chance off his own bowling.
If replicating the match conditions for any catch are difficult, doing it for caught and bowled is nigh on impossible though Trevor Bayliss, England’s head coach, has attempted a solution for spin bowlers.
Whenever England practise, Bayliss gets Moeen Ali to bowl at a batsman who defends the ball while Bayliss, who is standing next to the batsman, hits a tennis ball back to him as a catch.
It is reasonably realistic and, while some reading this will contend that tennis and cricket balls are nothing like each other, it is still good practice as tennis balls are more difficult to catch than cricket ones providing fear of the harder ball is not a factor.
Solutions to revolutionise catching practice are not obvious though Bayliss might like to consider one that was used by a school coach I had in Kenya.
Whenever a match or practice was on our coach, Mr Kelly, would always have two tennis balls on him which he would throw, without a moment’s notice, at you to catch, whether in the dressing-room, the lunch queue, or the nets.
Punishment for dropping too many (he would keep tally) was to have to take the empty tea urns back to school, a distance of about 500 yards.
At altitude (Nairobi is nearly 6,000 ft above sea level), it was a backbreaking chore but it focused minds and hands to be forever ready for that unexpected catch.
Waugh also possessed superb reactions which meant he never looked hurried, lending him a graceful, no-nonsense air few have matched