The art of wicketkeeping: standing up and standing back

The wicketkeeper is the only member of the fielding side who is involved in every ball. Slips wait for an edge that may not come all day. A fine leg may go a session without touching the ball. The keeper crouches, watches the ball out of the hand, reads its line and length, moves, takes it and throws it back, roughly ninety times an hour, for six hours, on days that can reach forty degrees. Then does it again tomorrow. It is the most physically repetitive job on a cricket field and the one where a single lapse is most obviously and permanently visible.

It is also the least understood. Almost everyone watching can tell you whether a batter is playing well. Very few can tell you whether a keeper is, until something goes wrong.

Standing up and standing back

Everything in wicketkeeping starts with a single decision: where to stand.

Standing back means positioning far enough behind the stumps that the ball arrives after bouncing, at a comfortable height, with time to move to it. Against genuine pace a keeper may be twenty metres or more behind the stumps. The take is relatively straightforward. The difficulty is in the geometry: the keeper is now part of a catching cordon, and the depth at which the keeper stands sets the depth of the slips. Stand too shallow and edges burst through hands; stand too deep and catches fall short. The keeper's judgement of pace, bounce and how much the ball is carrying is what the whole cordon is calibrated against, and a good cordon adjusts continuously through a session as the ball softens and the surface changes.

Standing up means taking position immediately behind the stumps, close enough to break them with a glove on the same movement as the take. The ball arrives quickly, often after deviating, and frequently without the keeper having seen it for part of its journey because the batter's body and bat are in the way. There is no recovery time. It is the harder job by a wide margin and it is where keepers are actually judged.

The obvious case for standing up is spin. The less obvious and more interesting case is standing up to seam. A keeper who comes up to a medium-pacer, or to a fast bowler operating at reduced pace, takes away the batter's ability to walk down the pitch or to leave the crease when playing forward. It converts every front-foot push into a shot that must be played from inside the line. In Twenty20 cricket, where batters routinely advance to disrupt a bowler's length, keepers now stand up to bowlers who would never have had a keeper up to them a generation ago. It has become a tactical instrument rather than a demonstration of skill.

The great keepers of the past were defined partly by their willingness to come up. Alan Knott standing up to Derek Underwood on a turning pitch is the reference point in England; the same is true of Bob Taylor, Godfrey Evans and Jack Russell, and in Australia of Ian Healy keeping to Shane Warne through a decade of leg spin on surfaces that offered wildly different amounts of turn. Syed Kirmani and Farokh Engineer kept to Indian spin attacks in which four bowlers all turned the ball different ways. Wasim Bari did the same in Pakistan. None of it looked spectacular, which was the point.

Taking spin

Keeping to spin is the discipline that separates good keepers from adequate ones, and it comes down to a single principle: wait.

The instinct when a ball is spinning is to move early towards where you expect it to end up. That instinct is wrong. Spin is not fully determined until the ball has pitched, and the amount of turn on a given delivery in a given over is not predictable, particularly against a wrist spinner who has three or four ways of gripping the ball. A keeper who commits before the bounce is beaten by the delivery that does not turn, which is usually the one that gets an edge or a stumping.

So the keeper watches the ball onto the pitch, reads the deviation off the surface, and then moves. The window between the bounce and the take, at the pace a spinner bowls, is perhaps a third of a second. Everything in the technique is designed to make that third of a second usable.

The crouch is low and balanced, weight on the balls of the feet, heels barely off the ground, eyes level and as close to the height of the ball's path as the body allows. The hands start low, fingers pointing down rather than forward, because a ball taken with fingers pointing at it is a ball taken on the fingertips, and a ball taken on the fingertips is a ball that hurts and is often dropped. The hands rise with the bounce.

The take itself is soft. The keeper gives with the ball, drawing the hands back towards the body as contact is made, so that the ball decelerates over a distance rather than stopping dead against a rigid glove. A ball taken hard rebounds out. This is why keeping looks so undramatic when it is done well: the ball seems to disappear into the gloves without a sound.

The footwork is sideways and late, and it does not cross over. Crossing the feet closes the hips and takes away the ability to change direction, which is exactly what a keeper needs when the ball has done something unexpected off the surface. Instead the keeper pushes off the trailing foot and moves the leading foot, keeping the body square to the ball's line.

Two deliveries cause most of the trouble. The one that turns sharply and beats the outside edge forces the keeper to move wide of off stump, take the ball outside the line of the body, and stay balanced enough to complete a stumping. The one that goes straight on, the arm ball or the slider, arrives faster than expected and lower, and it is the one that goes for byes.

The stumping

A stumping is the most elegant dismissal in cricket and the one most misunderstood by people who have not attempted it.

The mistake amateurs make is to try to take the ball and break the stumps simultaneously, or to move the gloves towards the stumps before the ball is safely in them. Both produce the same result: the ball is spilled, and the batter, having been beaten and out of the crease, is not out.

The correct sequence is sequential and unhurried, which is counter-intuitive when the batter is stranded and every instinct says to rush. The keeper takes the ball cleanly, behind the line of the stumps, and only then brings the gloves back onto the bails in a single continuous movement. The whole thing takes a fraction of a second longer than the panicked version and succeeds far more often. Watch a good keeper in slow motion and the take and the break are visibly two actions joined by one flow, not one action.

There are complications. A leg-side stumping, where the ball has passed down the leg side and the keeper must take it out of sight of the batter and then come back across to the stumps, is the hardest dismissal in the game to complete. Off a wide delivery outside off, the keeper must take the ball at full stretch and still get the gloves back. And against a batter who uses the crease constantly, the keeper is being asked to be ready for a stumping on every ball while never anticipating one.

Third-umpire review has changed the margins. Stumpings are now decided by frame-by-frame examination of when the bails were dislodged relative to when any part of the batter's foot or bat was grounded behind the line. Dismissals that would once have been given not out because the naked eye could not separate them are now given. The technique has not changed; the tolerance for a slow take has.

The leg-side take

The single hardest routine act in keeping is taking a ball down the leg side, and it is hard for a reason that has nothing to do with hand-eye coordination.

When a ball is bowled down the leg side to a right-handed batter, the keeper standing up loses sight of it. The batter's body and the bat obscure the ball for the portion of its flight that includes the bounce. The keeper therefore has to predict, from what was seen before the ball disappeared, where and how it will emerge, and get the body behind that point, in the fraction of a second available.

The technique is to push hard off the leg closer to the stumps, move across so that the body is behind the line of the ball rather than reaching for it with one glove, and take the ball with both hands, fingers down, in front of the body. Reaching one-handed is what happens when the movement is too late, and it is why so many leg-side chances are missed even by good keepers.

Doing this against a fast bowler while standing back is difficult enough. Doing it standing up, off a spinner, and then coming back across to the stumps to complete a stumping, is the manoeuvre by which keepers are ranked among themselves. Very few players in any era have been genuinely reliable at it.

The leg-side take also has a strategic effect that is rarely mentioned. A keeper who is known to be secure down the leg side allows a captain to set a field that concedes leg-side deliveries, and allows a bowler to attack the pads without fear of four byes. A keeper who is not reliable there quietly costs runs on every delivery that misses.

Setting up to genuine pace

Standing back to a fast bowler is a different discipline again, closer to slip catching than to keeping up.

The starting position is deeper and slightly more upright, because the ball will arrive at chest height or above and a very low crouch has nowhere to go. The keeper takes a preliminary movement as the bowler releases, a small split or hop that puts the body in a state of readiness rather than in a fixed stance, and then moves.

The main technical problem is the ball that carries. On a fast, bouncy surface, deliveries arrive higher and later than the keeper's stance assumes, and everything has to be recalibrated: the depth, the height of the hands, and the point of the take. On a slow, low surface the opposite applies and the keeper is diving forward for balls that die. Keepers talk about "getting the depth right" and it is the first thing they establish in a session, usually within a couple of overs, by watching the carry to slip as much as their own takes.

Then there are the edges. A thin edge from a ball travelling at high pace deviates late and arrives quickly, and the keeper's take is often the difference between a wicket and a run. A thick inside edge that deflects off the pad and comes at the keeper from an unexpected angle is one of the least forgiving chances in the game. The keeper also has to take the ball that is deliberately bowled short and rises over head height, and to do it while remembering that a ball that passes above head height and beyond reach is a wide or a bye depending on the format.

Swing and reverse swing add another layer. A ball that swings late in its flight has to be tracked all the way, and reverse swing in particular moves in the last few metres, which is precisely the part of the trajectory the keeper is committing to. Our piece on how reverse swing works explains the mechanism; from the keeper's end, it means the ball is doing the opposite of what the shine suggests, and the keeper is often the first person on the field to notice it has started.

Glovework, footwork and the small things

A few technical points recur across every good keeper regardless of era or country.

Head still and level. If the head moves during the take, the eyes lose the ball. Everything else in the technique exists to keep the head steady while the rest of the body moves.

Move after the ball has pitched, not before. Applies to spin absolutely, and to seam more than people think, because the ball that nips off the surface is the one that produces the edge.

Fingers down, not forward. Below waist height, fingers point at the ground. Above it, they point up. In the awkward zone around the hips, the keeper turns the hands so that the palms face the ball and the fingers point outwards.

Take the ball under the eyes. Wherever possible, get the body behind the line so the ball is taken close to the centre of the body rather than out to one side. One-handed takes are for balls that cannot be reached any other way, not a stylistic preference.

Give with the ball. Soft hands, drawing back on contact. A keeper whose hands are rigid will spill catches that a keeper with soft hands takes without noticing.

Stay down. The commonest fault, at every level, is rising out of the crouch too early. The keeper stands up, the ball keeps low, and it goes underneath the gloves. Coaches say "watch the ball into the gloves" for this reason, not because keepers forget to look at it.

The equipment matters more than it looks. Gloves are chosen for how they close rather than how much padding they have, inner gloves and sometimes a chamois are used to absorb impact and sweat, and keepers reshape and break in new gloves obsessively. In hot conditions the gloves are changed during a session because wet leather does not hold a ball.

Byes, incidentally, are a poor measure of keeping quality, though they are the only one on the scorecard. A keeper standing up to spin on a rough surface will concede byes that a keeper standing back on a flat one never faces. A keeper who dives to stop a ball that would have been four byes has done more work than one who never had to. The scorecard records the failure and not the save.

How the keeper shapes a side's balance

Selection of a keeper is not a specialist decision made in isolation. It changes the shape of the whole team.

A side has eleven places. Take one for the keeper and one for the captain if the captain is not otherwise accounted for, and the remaining places have to cover enough batting to post a total and enough bowling to take twenty wickets. In Test cricket the standard shapes are six batters, a keeper and four bowlers, or five batters, a keeper, an all-rounder and four bowlers. In each case the keeper's batting is the swing factor.

If the keeper can bat properly, the side can play an extra bowler without weakening the batting, or play a specialist batter without shortening the tail. If the keeper cannot, the side either bats one short or bowls one short. That single question determines how aggressive a captain can be with the ball, whether a fourth seamer can be rested mid-innings, and whether a spinner can be given a long defensive spell.

There is also the invisible contribution. The keeper is the only fielder facing the batter all day, and therefore the only one who can see how the ball is behaving off the surface, whether the batter's feet are moving, whether a bowler's wrist position has slipped, whether the ball has started to reverse. Good keepers run a continuous commentary to the captain and the slips, and captains who are not keepers themselves rely on it heavily. Several international captains have kept wicket, which is regarded as an enormous workload but gives the captain the best view on the field.

And there is the energy. A fielding side that has been in the field for two sessions takes its tempo from the keeper. It is the oldest cliché in the game and it is true.

The rise of the keeper-batter

For most of cricket's history, keepers were picked for keeping. Runs were a bonus and their absence was tolerated. England picked Bob Taylor and Jack Russell in eras when better batters were available, on the basis that the keeping was worth the runs. Most countries had a version of the same argument.

That consensus broke in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Adam Gilchrist did not invent aggressive batting from the keeper, and he was not the first keeper to score heavily, but he changed the expectation permanently. Batting at seven, he scored at a rate that turned a side's tail into a second top order and made totals possible from positions that had previously been recoveries. It meant Australia could play four frontline bowlers and still bat deep. Once one side had that, everyone wanted it.

The effect on selection has been comprehensive. Keeping is still assessed, but the batting threshold has risen to the point where a keeper who cannot make runs is very hard to pick at international level in any format. Kumar Sangakkara kept wicket for a long period of a career built on batting, and gave the keeping up in Tests specifically so that his batting would not carry the load of both. Mahendra Singh Dhoni built an unorthodox but extremely effective keeping technique around a body and a set of instincts developed as a batter, and was as quick to the stumps as anyone. Mark Boucher, Matt Prior, Brendon McCullum, Quinton de Kock, Jos Buttler, Rishabh Pant, Mohammad Rizwan, Mushfiqur Rahim and Alex Carey have all been picked as cricketers who keep rather than as keepers who bat.

In the shortest format the logic is even stronger. A Twenty20 side needs eleven players who contribute with bat or ball, and a keeper who bats at eight and does not score is close to unaffordable. Keepers now routinely open the innings in Twenty20 cricket, which would have been an eccentric selection thirty years ago.

The women's game followed the same trajectory and in some respects led it. Sarah Taylor's keeping, particularly standing up, was regarded by professionals in both the men's and women's games as among the best of her generation, and she batted in the top order. Professionalisation has since raised the standard of glovework substantially across the leading teams while the batting expectation has risen alongside it.

Something has been lost. Keepers who would have been picked in an earlier era for their glovework alone now play domestic cricket and are never selected, and there are still Tests decided by a dropped chance that a specialist would have taken. But the trade has generally gone the way of the batting, because the arithmetic of team balance is unforgiving and a hundred from number seven is easier to see than a leg-side take that never happened.

What to watch for

If you want to judge a keeper rather than simply notice when one errs, watch these things.

Watch the feet, not the hands. Good keepers are almost always in position before they take the ball; poor ones are reaching.

Watch whether the keeper moves before or after the ball pitches against spin. Early movement is the tell.

Watch the takes down the leg side, standing up. Everything else can be hidden. That one cannot.

Watch how the keeper's depth changes across a session standing back, and whether the slips move with them.

Watch the throw. A keeper who collects and returns the ball cleanly to the bowler for six hours without a fumble is doing something considerably harder than it appears.

And watch what happens after a mistake. The keeper is the one player who cannot hide, cannot be moved to fine leg, and gets the next ball regardless. The good ones look exactly the same on the delivery after a drop as on the one before it. You can find the records of the players who did it best in our player database.