‘A hollowing out of the spirit’: the agony of a dropped catch in cricket

Marco Jansen’s narrow, two-metre frame is slumped. His lissom limbs hang abject, crumpled. It’s not his baggy cable-knit sweater forcing his back to arch and his knees to bow, but something unseen. It’s the realisation of what he has just done. Marco Jansen has just dropped a catch.

In a Test match, in front of a full house at the Oval, off the very first ball of England’s final innings with the game on the line. He raises one of his hubcap-sized hands up to his once chiselled but now somehow sallow, sunken features. He rubs his brow and fixes his eyes to the ground, imploring the turf to swallow him up, begging the blades of grass to scythe him into tiny pieces.

Kagiso Rabada, Jansen’s teammate and the wronged bowler, stands at the end of his follow through and surveys the sorry scene in the slips. His face blank but also written with a thousand simultaneous emotions. Rabada has delivered exactly what was expected of him with his very first delivery.

He has bowled a fast ball that has shaped across the left-handed Alex Lees and tempted the England opener into fencing his bat in non-committal fashion. The ball has kissed the edge of Lees’s blade and travelled at a comfortable height and speed to Jansen at fourth slip, where a split-second misjudgment or tiny loss of concentration sees the ball hit him on the wrists and deflect to the floor a few yards behind his tumbling frame.

Hours earlier Jansen had led his team from the field, the ball firmly in his clutches as he raised it, shyly, to the stands. A souvenir of his Test-best bowling figures, five wickets for 35 runs, that had helped haul his side back into contention in the series-deciding third Test.

What Jansen would give to go back to that earlier hour, or even