The One Skill No One Is Born Without: On Refusing to Forgive Bad Fielding
There is a peculiar generosity in the way we talk about fielding. A batsman edges to the keeper and we call it a good ball; a bowler is driven for four and we say he was unlucky. But when a fielder grasses a regulation chance at midwicket, the commentary softens almost apologetically — “these things happen,” “the ball held up in the lights,” “he’ll take that nine times out of ten.” We forgive fielding in a way we would never forgive a loose shot or a rank full toss. And I have come, over four decades in and around the game, to believe that the forgiveness is precisely the problem.
Consider what fielding actually is. Batting is, in part, a gift — the hand-eye coordination, the timing, the still head; some of it is dealt to you at birth, and no amount of throwdowns will manufacture it in a man who simply does not have it. Bowling, too, rewards the accident of a good action, a strong back, a wrist that snaps the seam. But fielding asks for nothing you were born with. It asks for anticipation, for the willingness to walk in with the bowler, for hands made soft by ten thousand catches, for a body prepared to hit the ground. Every one of those is a decision, repeated until it hardens into a habit. Which means a poor fielding side is not an unlucky side — it is a side that has chosen, somewhere along the way, not to bother.
This is why the numbers from IPL 2026 ought to trouble us more than they seem to. After fifty-nine matches, the fielding sides had held 541 catches and dropped 153 — a catching efficiency of 77.9 percent, with six of the ten franchises operating below the eighty-percent line. The figure peaked at 81.5 percent in 2023 and has slid ever since. These are the best-paid, best-resourced cricketers on earth, with fielding coaches and GPS vests and video analysts at their disposal, putting down better than one clear chance in five. In a format where a single reprieve routinely costs forty match-turning runs, that is not a run of bad luck. It is a standard being quietly allowed to fall.
I want to give the other side of this a proper hearing, because it has one. The modern schedule is punishing; bodies are managed; a full-length dive on a rock-hard outfield is a genuine injury risk to a man with three formats and a franchise contract to protect. And the shortest format has inflated the sheer number of half-chances — the top-edge that loops into no-man’s-land was never a catch to begin with. All true. But none of it explains a shelled sitter at slip, and none of it survives contact with the men who simply refused the excuse.
Think of Eknath Solkar. Fifty-three catches in twenty-seven Tests — a rate no specialist of the modern era has approached — most of them taken at forward short leg, without a helmet, close enough to hear the batsman breathe. He was not a gifted athlete in the way we now use the word. He made himself indispensable by standing where no one else would stand and holding what no one else could hold. Bishan Bedi, whose bowling he transformed, put it plainly: “His close-in catching was really intimidating. We would not have been the same bowlers without him.” That is the sentence I would have every young cricketer commit to memory. A fielder made great bowlers greater. That is a choice, not a gift.
Or consider what a single man did to an entire cricketing culture. When Jonty Rhodes flung himself, ball in hand, into Inzamam-ul-Haq’s stumps at Brisbane in 1992, he did not merely complete a run-out; he announced that fielding could be a weapon, and South Africa built a national identity around the idea. They were not dealt more talent than everyone else. They decided that the third of the game nobody else took seriously would be the third they owned — and sides that make that decision tend to keep making it, long after the men who started it have gone.
So when a young player asks why I am so unforgiving about fielding — why I will wince harder at a dropped catch than at a soft dismissal — this is my answer. I am hard on it because it is the one department of the game with nowhere to hide behind talent. You cannot plead that you were not born with it: everyone is born able to field well, and almost no one is born unable to. Mediocrity there is not a shortfall of ability. It is a shortfall of standards — and standards, unlike gifts, are entirely within our power to raise. That is the whole reason I refuse to forgive bad fielding: it is the one failure on a cricket field that is always, unarguably, a choice.
— Vijay
If this landed, forward it to a coach who still treats fielding as the afterthought at the end of a session — and hit reply and tell me the finest piece of fielding you ever saw in the flesh.
Vijay coaches the thinking game — fielding standards included — in person at VB PASE Cricket Academy (vbpasecricketacademy.com) and through one-to-one mentorship; enquire at vijayrbharadwaj.com/#contact.