Catches Win Matches:An article from the Times

The Times May 23, 2006:Relaxed way to prevent repeat of Lord's spills -Our correspondent returns to the coaching manual to find cure for England's woes

'CATCHES win matches' is one of cricket's oldest saws, kept alive by every passing drop. There has been much wringing of hands over the nine chances that England put down at Lord's to let Sri Lanka escape with a draw from the first Test. All nine were catches in the arc from the wicketkeeper to point. One of the things that has been vexing Bob Simpson, the slip fielding guru, is the 'dramatic drop in the technique' of slip catching. For him it is not only a matter of concentration. Apart from Andrew Flintoff and Shane Warne, he criticises slip fielders for standing 'with their feet too far apart, which tenses the body and makes it nearly impossible to move with speed and control to either side of the body. They are forced to dive to anything outside of their body, thus creating a huge margin for error and restricting the area they can cover,' he said.

He castigates the introduction of football goalkeeping coaches to slip fielding practices and 'wicketkeepers fielding too deep and thus upsetting the alignment of the slips cordons'.

Simpson is well qualified to judge. He took 110 catches in Tests for Australia and passed his knowledge on to Mark Taylor and Mark Waugh, who is the leading catcher in Tests with 181 and is generally recognised as one of, if not the, best slip fielder in history.

The basics of slip fielding have not changed. Teaching Cricket: A Manual for Secondary School Teachers, a recent tome by the ECB, shows the classic pose familiar to teachers and students down the decades. 'Feet should be shoulder width apart or slightly wider,' it reads. 'Weight evenly spread, resting lightly on the balls of the feet. Knees flexed. Hands together, close to the ground, fingers pointing down. Head up, eyes level. Alert. Watch the ball into your hands. Allow the ball to come to you ' don't snatch at it. 'Give' with the ball as you receive it.' All eminently sensible but halfway through, present practice parts from theory. 'Hands together' is emphasised in red ink, but the England slip cordon at Lord's stood with hands firmly on knees as the bowler released. For Ian Botham it was a way of keeping relaxed. The secret to slip catching and, for that matter, bowling and batting is to be simultaneously alert and relaxed at the key moment of delivery. 'You have to find what works for you.

I fielded at slip and had my hands on my knees,' Clive Radley, the former Middlesex and England batsman, and MCC head coach, said. 'If you're stood there with your hands pointing outwards, you can get tense like that. It's about switching on and off, more that than anything perhaps. You teach them to watch the ball into the hands. You teach them to take the ball on the base of the fingers ' not the palm of the hands or the tips of the fingers ' then the fingers will automatically clasp around it. 'Sometimes with the (MCC) young cricketers I get them to watch the seam or a particular part of the ball, so they watch it closely. But you get guys who will catch anything in practice and they'll get a simple one in the middle and it will go down. That's just tension and you can overcome it with experience. Then it is a case of where you look. The theory is that you watch the ball at first slip and any farther round than that you watch the edge of the bat. But I used to be second or third slip and still watched the ball.' Waugh, a second slip, used to watch the bowler and then the ball all the way down the pitch.

Mark Simpson, a leading sports scientist, divides taking a catch into three parts ' anticipation, reaction and movement. 'It is well documented in sports like tennis and cricket over 50 years that picking out certain cues from the bowler or batsman is vital because the ball travels too quickly to rely solely on reaction,' Simpson said. 'Some are better at that than others and concentration is the variable that affects that detection and reaction.'

The problem remains of practising slip catching. 'No one is good enough to edge the ball all the time, so all you can do is run it off the face,' Radley said. 'I used to catch hundreds of balls off a slip cradle, but you don't see them so much these days. That is a shame, I thought they were good.'

(Ta to CK1)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,426-2192246,00.html