Fielding: the story of cricket’s quiet revolution

The best fielding teams, agree the experts, save themselves around 30 runs in an ODI innings in the field – and that’s not including the value of taking, rather than dropping, catches. Yet the West Indies team that arrived in England in May 2007 appeared not to know. There were dropped catches; fumbled stops; a reluctance to dive or slide; and a general lack of energy that both reflected and helped re-inforce the team’s apparent desire to be someplace else. When they arrived, they didn’t even have a fielding coach.

Then, after the first Test, they recruited Julien Fountain. Fountain, who was on Somerset’s books as a teenager before moving into baseball, has been a fielding coach since 1996. His CV is a who’s who of English and world cricket: he’s been a consultant to most of the first-class counties, worked at the ECB Academy and been head coach of England age-group teams as well as working with a roster of international teams. He first worked with the West Indies under the late Malcolm Marshall in 1998; last summer, he worked with Bob Woolmer’s Pakistan.

Back-to-back Tests gave Fountain limited time to work with the Windies; yet, by the time of the Twenty20s and ODIs, he had transformed their fielding. They looked lively, energetic, committed – and took the NatWest Series 2-1. The fielding was not the only factor in the transformation; but it was an important one.
SPIN meets Fountain at Shenley where he is coaching the England under-19 team, in their ODI series against Pakistan. Looking to find the secrets of his work with the West Indies, I sit with him as England defend their total of 160; Fountain keeps score – a ball-by-ball record of who’s done what in the field, on a standard notepad (software is in the pipeline). At the end of the five-match series, the data will go onto a computer and he will compile percentages: a player who deals with 89-92 per cent of his fielding duties satisfactorily is about average, says Fountain. High 90s is exceptional. “It’s when people drop down into the 70s and below that’s when you have a problem.”

While pundits and fans may notice spectacular (and dropped) catches, those working with the best teams are analysing and working on their fielding meticulously. The stats are vital; first impressions not necessarily reliable. “Dwayne Bravo is awesome to work with – but he does make some simple mistakes,” says Fountain of the man who may strike the lay spectator as the West Indies’ ‘best’ fielder. “So, yes, he will take a spectacular catch that everyone will notice but in the one-day series, he also fumbled two or three balls that would have been simple run-outs. He can look absolutely outstanding but his day-to-day ground-fielding can certainly be improved. He’s very quick, very athletic, is strong and can throw well. But, statistically, he can be let himself down.

“Also, it’s the pre-shot movements of a fielder that are really important – which you don’t see on TV and which if you’re at the ground, unless you’re a coach, you won’t be watching anyway.

Fountain scores his charges fairly: here at Shenley, he does not put a black mark against a running, dropped catch on the boundary; nor on a floored, low, reaction caught-and-bowled. A throw that’s slightly too high for the keeper just passes; one that’s too low fails. He does not expect miracles. A fluffed run out, with a Pakistani batter apparently caught ten yards out of his ground, attracts a less friendly response.

Fountain has been with the under-19s a matter of days but he’s confident that that’s enough to make a difference. His whistle-stop work with the West Indies brought rapid and excellent returns both in improved technique, but also in improved focus and energy.

“I was with them for the last three Tests and my attitude was that I would make some slow changes,” he says. “The second Test in the ice and snow at Headingley was… just shambolic. They were really poor. They don’t travel that well as a team. But then you started to see an improvement. I can’t take all the credit: there were a couple of personnel changes for the ODIs – we lost two of the worst fielders and we brought in Dwayne Smith… but the core group upped their ante, which I would like to claim responsibility for.”

“We tried to instill a different attitude in the field. They went from a very static, don’t-move-around-much, don’t-say-much, look-a-bit-unhappy sort of team to actually running around more, throwing the ball among themselves more, talking more, being more aggressive, being positive, executing their skills better, making sure they backed up and covered the stumps. Just making them a more aggressive, working unit.

“I said: one of the big things we’re not doing as a team is diving or sliding. And that’s killing us. We’re losing potentially 30 runs an innings just from not sliding when we run to retrieve a ball and not diving to block a ball. Just on that exrta four paces you takewhen you don’t slide to retrieve the ball is enough time to turn one run into two, or two into three. Only three or four extra paces by a fielder can turn one into two. All the time the fielder’s still running without getting the ball in his hand, the batters are running.

“We set them targets: ‘We as a team will dive x anumber of times in this innings’’ ‘We will slide x amount of times’; ‘We will hit the stumps x amount of times’. If you hit the stumps 15 times in a game, you’re more likely to get a run out than if you do it three times. It’s basic stats.

Fountain agrees that improving a team’s fielding is partly about the mental side: making sure every player is focused for every ball, getting them to anticipate what will happen, rather than merely reacting. And technically, it’s often not just a case of honing techniques, but of teaching them from scratch. “You would like to think that a player who plays Test match cricket would know every skill in the book. But they don’t. And some of them know dramatically fewer skills than others. I’m having to teach new skills to international players in their mid-20s. Which is kind of scary.”

A second international team that has recently revolutionised its fielding is Sri Lanka. Under Tom Moody and his assistant Trevor Penney they went to the World Cup final in April, partly on the back of their abilities in the field. Penney, having spent 17 years in county cricket, worked with England during the 2005 Ashes before taking the Sri Lanka job. He can trace the way attitudes to fielding have changed over the course of his own career. He tells SPIN: “When I first came to Warwickshire in the early 90s, I couldn’t believe it: they’d have nets then ten high catches and Gladstone Small would say it was time for his shower and that would be it. Cricket was stuck in a time warp. They’d say: ‘Oh – he’s a great fielder because he’s a natural athlete.’ And if you had a guy not perceived to be an athlete, well, that was that. But that’s changing. You can be taught to be a better fielder. Getting players to play a bit of football or squash in the off-season, getting their feet moving, working on co-ordination not just by practising fielding itself – which could just become boring. It’s about getting players to work on a blend of activities over quite a long time and that will help.”

England keeper Paul Nixon is another whose career has spanned the revolution in fielding. He made his county debut for Leicestershire in 1989. I ask him what work counties did on fielding at that time. “Nothing, really,” he says. “A few high catches and that was about it. Guys who had a decent arm went out on the boundary. Guys who were quick went on the sweep and the rest got in the ring. Now, it’s much more spcialised: left-handers field at square leg, so they can pick up and throw with their strong hand. People practice diving properly, hitting the stumps more often. There’s more analysis of throwing positions.

“I remember our fast bowlers when I started, stopping the ball with their feet when they were at fine leg. In those days, if a batsman played it to fine leg, he’d only look for one; these days they generally try to run two, straight off the bat – so that puts fielders under more pressure, so the quality has to improve, to stop that extra run.”

Nixon suggests that,within English cricket, Dermot Reeve was among the first to take fielding seriously, when he was captain of the all-counqueringWarwickshire side in the mid-90s. “There were always great fielders, individuals. But I think it would have been Dermot who took Warwickshire to new levels with their fielding when he was captain there. Doing the slides, the relay throws, that attention to detail, to stop batters turning a one into a two…”

Internationally, the man who has been credited with taking fielding to a higher level has been Australia’s Mike Young. An American with a background in baseball, he was brought into the Aussie camp by his friend, John Buchanan, after he became coach in 1999. “I’d lived in Australia for 20 years before hand, so I’d seen a lot of cricket, even though I’ve never played it,” Young tells SPIN. “But I think that helped me: I was able to look at the game from a whole different perspective, rather than from a traditional viewpoint.

“When I came in, I thought a lot needed to be changed. It was necessary to upgrade the tempo and the overall aggression of the fielding. I’d see bowlers practising little short catches, as if they were slip fieldmen. Only one problem: they never field in the slips. I’m all about guys having specialist positions, where they’re gonna be competitive. And if it means that a certain player only gets to do a little bit of fielding in a game well then we focus on the fine points of that little bit.

“In 20-over cricket, guys that aren’t able to be overall athletes are going to struggle. Traditionally an all-rounder was someone who could bat and bowl – but in my mind, you’re not an all-rounder unless you can do everything – including fielding – very effectively.”

Young singles out the ‘split-step’ as his proudest advance. While traditionally, fielders would walk in as the bowler ran in, Young insisted that was a waste of energy and that the important thing was to be in the best position to launch dynamic movement once the ball was bowled. The player should be on their toes, their weight even, as if ready to pounce, the way a tennis player would stand when about to receive serve. “Everybody’s picked up on that after us,” he says. “The other thing is the transfer of balls: guys chasing balls to the boundary – and throwing back – in pairs, not leaving someone to do the job themselves. New Zealand’s done a fantastic job in picking up on that. We started doing that at the 2003 World Cup. I’m not saying these things were never done before, but they weren’t done consistently. There’s a difference.”

Then there’s the overall style of Australia’s fielding, with every player looking to be involved with every ball. Put simply, in the field, more Australian players are moving more often. The team looks predatory. “I call it wolf-packing,” says Young. “All 11 players have total autonomy to attack the ball or throw the ball whenever they feel they can do it. I never talk about backing up – it’s an overused term: when you say ‘backing up’ you’re sending a negative message. We talk in terms of what happens if we hit the stumps and reacting to that. We wolf pack. We attack every ball. If we don’t have two or three guys going after every ball in the ring, well then we’re not doing the job we need to do.”

As Young concedes, his job has partly been about making the world’s best fielders even better. Tom Moody and Trevor Penney, conversely, inherited a Sri Lankan side with plenty of room for improvement. “When Tom and I arrived in 2005, we found the players were surprisingly naturally gifted in the field – but they didn’t practice properly. They’d have their catches and a couple of throws, but there was no great structure. Nothing was monitored,” he says.

“Tom and I introduced a fielding scoring chart, mainly for one-day cricket. Even a third man could be penalised for a bad throw from the boundary, even if it was right at the end of a game that we had lost easily. We logged everything onto a computer so we had every players’ averages over the last two years: pick-ups, run outs, throws, missed catches. Now and again, we’d pull it all out and go through it with each player: “Your throwing’s good but you need to work more on hitting the stumps.”

The best fielding sessions are focused, says Penney, who has now moved with Moody to coach Western Australia. “I don’t believe in very long sessions – one good hour, concentrating on throwing at the stumps from different areas – long throws, short throws, retrieving-and-throwing – is good. And everyone has 15-20 throws at the stumps from each set-up. And on another day, all you do is catching.”

Is there a deeper reason why India and Pakistan have arguably been the international teams that have been slowest to cotton onto the need to field well and Australia and South Africa – arguably – are sides that seem to relish it? Conventional wisdom would suggest that it’s easier to dive and slide on a lush South African outfield than an Indian dustbowl and our experts agree that this is a factor, as is the more general sporting culture of the country.

“If you grow up playing a contact sport – which Australians do, in terms of rugby or Australian rules – it brings another intangible to the party,” says Mike Young. “Playing another game, a quick contact game, brings an intangible benefit both mentally and physically to your fielding.”

Penney suggests that his own background, growing up in an outdoors, multi-sport culture in southern Africa, was a definite factor in his own abilities as a fielder.

“For me, it was a crucial thing playing a lot of hockey and squash and tennis: all the sports that keep you low to the ground, and give you good footwork. They teach you to read the play. Then, every time I was on the field, I wanted to be part of the game, so I always followed where the ball was going and saw it as a competition with the batsman, right from a young age.

“Talking to Jonty Rhodes, he was similar – when you’re waiting for your dad to pick you up, you’d be throwing stones at the lamp-posts and having competitions with your friends; or playing water cricket at your pool at home, skimming balls across the water. Everyone had a swimming pool. All that stuff must have helped.

“You don’t get that advantage everywhere. Everyone expects you to be a good diver on the field – but guys don’t even practice it. In Sri Lanka, we often couldn’t do sliding or diving practice because the field was so bad, so dry. And the soil isn’t always so healthy – you get a nasty grass burn and it could get infected.”

Julien Fountain agrees – but only up to a point. “Culturally, teams do differ. But that’s a pretty poor excuse. A team like Sri Lanka, culturally, you might expect to be on the same sporting plain as Pakistan or India – but Moody and Penney changed their fielding culture completely. They had a zero tolerance policy towards the fielding and now they’re all sliding about, throwing themselves around. That’s fantastic. The culture thing is a cop out. You can overcome it.”

While the coaches who spoke to SPIN agree that fielding deserves to be included within official stats -and not just as a catches tally – there are areas of fierce disagreement between them. One of the major areas of debate is over throwing technique. Paul Nixon explains the history: “Years ago, the West Indies were the best fielding side but they used to throw with very very low arms. Which was alright if you were playingTest cricket but when you were playing day-in day-out county cricket, you’d end up rupturing your bicep tendons and getting shoulder injuries. A lot of guys had to have operations because they had bad technique. That techniques been analysed over the year and now we know that it’s better to keep your elbow high and keeping the ball cross-seam and having a good base with your feet and your hips.”

Julien Fountain’s entree back into cricket in 1996 was as a throwing coach, teaching techniques not just to improve the consistency of results, but to prevent injury. “I was brought in specifically to change the throwing bio-mechanics, because of my background in baseball. But then I left the English system in 2000 and went abroad – so that message stopped getting through and other coaches came in and started giving English players a different message.”

Those other coaches include Mike Young, who has done two stints with the ECB Academy. While both Young and Fountain have a background in baseball, Fountain insists that cricket cannot lift throwing techniques directly from the American game – where fielders generally take the ball standing up,standing still, square on and, thanks to their catcher’s mitt, one-handed. In cricket, fielders generally take the ball on the ground, with two hands, side-on and moving forwards. The starting position is different, so, argues Fountain, the technique must also be different.

Young, however, has looked to import the crow-hop from baseball into cricket. The crow-hop involves bringing your back foot in FRONT of your front foot as you build up to throw. (The traditional way to throw from the boundary in cricket is to put it behind your front foot. The only way to understand this is to stand up right now and try it yourself.)

Young says he has aimed to bring a different rationale to the ways cricketers throw: “The first thing players are taught to do is to get it in quick. Well, when you get it in quick, ultimately you throw off balance which means you don’t have enough behind the throw; your accuracy will suffer and more importantly, you’ve been standing there doing nothing for 20 minutes and now you’re going to get it in quickly from 200 feet – well, you throw the ball and you could hurt yourself.

“Throwing is all about working in straight lines, getting your feet in the right position, being balanced. Yes, you need to get it in quick sometimes – but only on a very limited number of occasions. I focus on mainly vision – where your eyes go the ball will follow; and balance. I don’t think you throw with your arm or your hand – I think you throw with your feet. You have to have quick feet and be in a position to be accurate with your throws. That’s exactly where I’m at.”

Fountain stresses that he has serious issues with the crow-hop throw. At the very least, the many England players who have worked with both Fountain and Young over the years will have been taught different techniques; Fountain maintains that, bio-mechanically, the crow-hop throw is less accurate, less powerful and more likely to lead to injury and he’s been working with American sports scientists to prove his point.

There may be debates about best practice, but the key point of agreement is that every team needs to study and work hard at its fielding. To neglect it, is to give runs away. Any team that takes its eye off the ball, fielding-wise, will suffer. More than batting or bowling, it seems to be the discipline that can decline or improve most rapidly; something that all squad members must work on hard on the training ground – and then execute in two-hour bursts on the park. The quest for perfection continues. “Everybody always needs to work on their balance; everybody always needs to work on their speed,” says Mike Young. “However quick you are, you never stop working on those things.”

The best in the world

by Trevor Penney, ex-Sri Lanka fielding coach

“If he concentrated, on his day, Ricky Ponting is probably the best. He hits the stumps more than anybody and he can field anywhere: he’s a great slipper, he can field in the ring or on the boundary, he has a good arm.

“Andrew Symonds is a freak – he’s so strong and he dives well and he has a good arm. I don’t think he’s as complete a fielder as Ponting. He’s a good diver and it’s hard to get past him but he’s not a guy who runs in and swoops one-handed and hits the stumps.

“Tillekarantne Dilshan can dive but it’s more about him reading what’s happening and then swooping and hitting the stumps. He can get you two wickets a game with run-outs or, even with the runs that he saves which builds the pressure and leads to the batsman getting out. He could save 15 or 20 runs on his own on a good day.

“Paul Collingwood – he’s a fantastic fielder, must be one of the best catchers around and a great diver and stopper. He hasn’t got as many direct hits recently – but he’s gone in the slips some more now, which can make you a bit more lazy!

“Dwayne Bravo – fantastic fielder at point;

“Michael Clarke is great at hitting the stumps plus he’s left-handed, a wonderful fielder to have at point.

“Our best boundary fielder with Sri Lanka was Upul Tharanga – he has a great arm and he reads it very well; the ball is halfway in before you know it. People very rarely get twos against him. In the slips Mahela Jayawardene is fantastic, one of the best I’ve seen – and Freddie Flintoff too. I could go on…

The best in the world, part 2

by Mike Young, Australia fielding coach

The three best fielders in the world are on the Australian team. That’s my opinion and it might sound biased but that’s what I truly believe: Ricky Ponting, Michael Clarke and Andrew Symonds. Michael Hussey is right there too and then, as a slipper, Matthew Hayden: he’s the best slip fieldsman in the world, no doubt about it in my mind. From there on, you have Dilshan from Sri Lanka and de Villiers and Gibbs from South Africa.