The One Skill No One Is Born Without: On Refusing to Forgive Bad Fielding

There is a particular silence that falls on a ground when a simple catch goes down. It is not the roar that greets a wicket, nor the low groan that follows a boundary — it is a collective intake of breath, an embarrassment the whole crowd seems to feel on the fielder’s behalf. I have stood inside that silence from both sides: as the man who put down the chance, and as the man beside him who had the sense to say nothing. And I have come to think it is the most honest sound in cricket — because a dropped catch is the one failure that cannot hide behind talent.

Consider what the game truly asks of us. Batting, for all our talk of graft, is in large part a gift — the eye that picks length early, the timing that arrives a fraction before thought, the hundredth of a second a great player seems to have been granted at birth. Bowling too: the loose-limbed action that never breaks down, the wrist that puts revolutions on a ball the rest of us can only push. A man is dealt these cards. He can sharpen them, but he cannot deal himself a better hand. Fielding is the one department that owes nothing to any of this. No child is born a great fielder. It is built — rep by rep, in the unwatched hours, in the drills nobody applauds.

Which is precisely why I will not forgive bad fielding, and why I think it a mistake to be sentimental about it. Look at this IPL. Across the league stage, catching efficiency had slipped to a shade under seventy-eight per cent; six of the ten sides were holding fewer than four of every five chances that came to them. When a team drops its catches at that rate, it is not confessing a lack of ability. It is confessing a lack of standards. The two are not the same thing, and we do the game a disservice when we pretend they are.

The other side deserves a hearing, and it is a fair one. Catches are missed by great fielders too — even Jonty Rhodes put down chances, and every honest cricketer carries a ghost or two that still visits him. The modern schedule is punishing; the outfields under lights are quick and false; the white ball dips and swirls late in a way the eye cannot always be sure of. All of this is real, and a captain who screams at every drop understands nothing about the human being under the ball. Grant every word of it.

And yet the aggregate is a choice, even when the single moment is not. I think of Eknath Solkar, who held fifty-three catches in twenty-seven Tests — a rate at forward short leg no fielder has matched — and who was, by common consent, not the most naturally gifted cricketer in that famous side. Bishan Bedi’s tribute was blunt: “We would not have been the same bowlers without him.” Solkar made himself indispensable by walking in to the one position every other man wanted to walk away from, and by doing the work that turns a good pair of hands into a great one. His talent did not put him under the edge of the bat. His decision did.

You can see the same truth at the scale of a whole cricketing culture. South Africa, from the moment Rhodes flew sideways to run out Inzamam-ul-Haq in 1992, simply decided that fielding would be non-negotiable — the training changed, the outfields improved, and a generation grew up believing that the man who saved twenty runs had done as much as the man who scored them. That is the point I keep returning to. A side can decide to be excellent in the field. It cannot decide to be born with a cover drive. Fielding is the one place where excellence is, from first to last, a matter of will.

So when I am asked why I hold fielding to a stricter standard than the rest of the game, this is my answer: it is the only department where the effort and the reward line up perfectly, with nothing in between to take the blame. I will forgive a batsman beaten by a ball that jags back and clips the top of off; I will forgive a bowler carted by a better player on the day. That is the contest doing its proper work — skill against skill, luck evening out. But I will not forgive a man beaten by his own indifference in the field, because that is not the game defeating him. That is him defeating himself, and taking ten teammates down with him.

Reward skill, punish sloth, and never confuse the one for the other. The scorecard will not always tell you who worked and who was merely gifted — but the field, if you watch it closely enough, always will.

— Vijay

Vijay coaches the thinking game in person at VB PASE Cricket Academy (vbpasecricketacademy.com) and through one-to-one mentorship; if you would like your cricket sharpened rather than flattered, write to him via vijayrbharadwaj.com/#contact.