Why catching remains paramount in winning cricket matches

“Catches win matches” is one of cricket’s oldest and tritest adages.

In my club match last weekend, one of the opposition’s players was winning the game, having survived two dropped catches. He had just completed his century, there was one wicket left to fall, nine runs needed to win and 11 deliveries remaining. He attempted to hit a six, the ball going in the direction of a lone fielder on the boundary edge. The ball was in the air a long time before the fielder safely clutched it to end the match. Had he dropped the ball, who knows what the final result would have been? Of course, the chances are that the match would have been over much sooner had either of the two earlier offered chances been taken.

There are much more famous examples of catches winning matches or dropped catches losing matches. In the final match and the final day of the 2005 England versus Australia series at the Oval in London, the home team needing a draw to regain the Ashes, were only 99 runs ahead, three wickets down, with over six hours left to play. At that point, Kevin Pietersen, on 13, edged a ball to the late Shane Warne at first slip, who dropped what, for him, was a straightforward catch. Despite Warne’s herculean bowling effort in taking 12 wickets in the match, he ended up on the losing side, as Pietersen scored 158 in a pulsating, counter-attacking innings.

A very expensive dropped catch occurred at Edgbaston, Birmingham on June 3, 1994. In a county match between Warwickshire and Durham, the Durham wicketkeeper dropped Brian Lara on 16. He went on to score 501, the highest ever individual score in first class cricket, which included an astonishing 390 runs in a single day.

In November 2014, at Eden Gardens, Kolkata, Indian batman