“Catches win matches.” As cricketing cliché, it has few equals. It is more than just a cliché in the game, it is a truism. Every time a catch is dropped, supporters shake their heads and lament in those three words. These days, this lament takes a sophisticated form. Observers have taken to pointing out the “cost” of a dropped catch. For example. England’s head coach Trevor Bayliss pointed out that three dropped catches cost England 500 runs in England’s innings defeat in the fifth Test at Chepauk in Chennai.
The obsession with “specialist” catchers among professional observers of the game is a longstanding one. There is a great deal of detailed analysis about specialist slip fielders for fast bowlers and spinners. Disruptions in slip cordons due to retirements, loss of form or injury are noted, especially when a chance goes abegging.
Ever heard of a specialist ‘catcher’?
There are two central problems with this obsession with catching. First, for all the importance attached to catching, no player in any international team anywhere is selected primarily for the ability to take catches. Given a choice between a truly world class batsman who is a poor fielder and catcher, and an ordinary batsman who is a great slip catcher, the former always gets picked, and rightly so. Second, it confuses things which are easily observed with things which are important.
There is no evidence to suggest that “great” catchers drop significantly fewer catches than ordinary catchers. The only evidence is that they take a large number of catches. The Melbourne based statistician Charles Davis has been compiling records of misses and drops and recently wrote a long essay about his findings in The Cricket Monthly.
Between 2003 and 2009, when Australia were the best team in the world, they dropped 23.2% of their chances in Test cricket. England dropped 25.5% of their chances. From 2003 to 2009, Australia took 906 catches in 82 Tests. At a drop rate of 23.2% this means they created 1116 chances, or 13.6 chances per match. England created 12.1 chances per match. England took 9.67 catches per match. Australia would take as many catches per match as England even if they missed 30% of their chances.
Even the greatest teams had slippery fingers
The Australians of that period were considered a great fielding and catching side. Much of Warne and McGrath’s success is often attributed to stellar slip catching. Yet, even that great Australian side dropped about two catches out of nine offered. Davis reports that the best catching record among long-serving players is Graeme Smith’s. Smith dropped 14% of the chances which came his way, or one in seven. Andrew Strauss and Ross Taylor dropped one in five. Ricky Ponting, who took 196 Test catches and is considered one of the greatest fielders and catchers in the history of Test cricket, dropped 22% of the chances which came his way.
It is much harder to observe the creation of chances. Chances are the result of the bowler inducing the batsman to make a mistake. Consider two teams. The first creates a chance every 40 balls, the other creates a chance every 60 balls. If the first team takes 10 chances out of 15, it will take 10 wickets in 600 balls (or 100 overs). Even if the second team takes 10 chances out of 12, it will still take 720 balls to dismiss 10 batsmen (or 120 overs). Despite catching more poorly, the first team will dismiss the opposition in 120 fewer deliveries. At three runs per over, that is 60 fewer runs.
What’s more important is creating chances
This argument about dropped catches can also be extended to occasional umpiring mistakes. If we think of a dropped catch, a harsh umpiring decision, or a batsman who plays a false shot but the ball lands safely – every instance in which the batsman makes a mistake – to be a chance, then it is usually the team which creates more chances which wins, and not the team which converts a higher percentage of the chances that it creates.
Given home advantage, especially considering the tremendous importance of the pitch, Test matches in which both teams are equally capable of creating chances are extremely rare. Anil Kumble, Harbhajan Singh, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and other Indian spinners tend to bowl better in Indian conditions than most visiting spinners. When visiting teams can field high quality spinners (as England did in 2012-‘13), they are successful. But this is not because their catchers are magically better, it is because their bowlers creates chances more frequently.
Record keeping in cricket is not as sophisticated as it is in baseball where errors have been tracked systematically for decades. The result is that in cricket, observers tend to cling to the most obviously visible events in order to draw their conclusions. Trevor Bayliss is probably right that three missed catches cost England 500 runs at Chepauk. This observation should lead to questions about England’s bowling, not their catching. Privately, it would be very surprising if Bayliss does not realize this. That he should bring up England’s fielding in a press conference is curious. Among all of England’s shortcomings compared to the hosts on their Test tour of India, their catching was perhaps the most trivial one.