Brexiteers and Trumplanders have a low level of education

Amol Rajan in The Independent

At the same time, and for similar reasons, many Western democracies are tearing apart. It’s too neat to say they’re splitting in half, but the Brexit vote and America’s bipolar political system make it impossible to avoid this temptation. 

Like several other writers, including Danny Finkelstein of The Times, I like to give these different countries a name. Britain is splitting in two: between those who voted Leave – the residents of Leaveland – and those who voted Remain – the residents of Remainia. Similarly, America is splitting in two: what I call Trumpland and Clintonia. 

As David Runciman argued in a seminal recent essay forThe Guardian, the single biggest thing driving those who voted Leave, and those who are likely to vote Trump, is their low level of education. Among non-college educated white men, Trump leads Clinton by nearly 60 percentage points. This is an astonishing gulf. 

Meanwhile in Britain, as Runciman’s brilliant analysis made clear, the Remain vote was often an island of resistance amid a sea of Leave: Norwich, Cardiff, Bristol, Nottingham, Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter, Warwick and Reading all voted to stay in the EU. They are all places with good universities.

People with a good education are more confident of being able to survive the hyper-mobility that is the essential quality of a globalised economy, where automation and high levels of migration cause massive displacement. Those who voted to Leave the EU, like those who will vote for Trump, tend to be those who reject cosmopolitanism and the liberal values – especially tolerance of minorities – that come with it. They are much more rooted in a place called home, and much less likely to look upon industrial upheaval and innovation as an opportunity.

The year 2016, in which I became a father, will be remembered as the year that we moved into a post-liberal world. Though it lags the financial crisis by several years, the ruptures that are evident this year have been widened by that seismic event. Economic and social liberalism, which has governed the world for around four decades, is going out of fashion, and I have to say that I feel pessimistic as a result.

Not because I am wedded to liberalism, which has inherent faults and contradictions. Rather, because if you look at the economic, social, political, demographic and – perhaps above all – educational trends driving apart the people of Clintonia and Trumpland, and Remainia and Leaveland, it seems clear to me things are going to get worse before they get better.

Places like Great Yarmouth and Boston, which tend to sway strongly toward Ukip, are the regional centres of Leaveland. If any of the above argument is remotely coherent, it cannot be overstated just how essential it is that the government of the day radically improve levels of education in such places. The alternative, frankly speaking, is too grim to contemplate.

Bob Dylan - Literature, unplugged

Vaibhav Sharma in The Hindu

In the space of two years, the Nobel has shed decades of conservatism, and twice redefined what it considers, and what we must consider, ‘literature’

In 1997, Eric Zorn, a columnist in the Chicago Tribune, advocated for Bob Dylan to be awarded the Nobel Prize. “And though it's likely that snobbery will forever doom the chances of a folk-rock musician to join the roster of past winners that includes such literary giants as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison,” Zorn wrote, “the truth is that, for multi-faceted talent with language and sustained international impact, few if any living writers are Dylan's equal.”

A century earlier, in 1896, when the literature prize’s founding charter was read out from Alfred Nobel’s will, it recommended the award be conferred on the “person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”

Charter from another age

Alfred Nobel’s directive was formed in a time when the nineteenth century forms of the novel and the short story, along with the classical mediums of poetry and drama, constituted the zenith of literary expression. Nobel’s charter could not have imagined how these forms would remain significant and robust, but steadily become inadequate in representing the whole of lived experience in the twentieth century, the most violent in human history.

As the Nobel approached its centenary, around the time of Zorn’s plea to award Dylan the literature prize, it was clear that novels, poems, short stories and plays were not the sole expressions of literary prestige and value, but part of a wider constellation which included nonfiction reportage, narrative history and biography, academic treatises such as Edward Said’s Orientalism and — as acknowledged by Dylan’s award — the great tradition of songwriting, coming of age in the radical tumult of the 1960s.

But, as recently as two years ago, there lingered the sense that the Nobel remained, to its detriment, too faithful to its founding charter and strangely reluctant to recognise the varied art forms that so powerfully enhanced our understanding of the modern age. For every inspired choice, such as J.M. Coetzee or Mo Yan, there was a J.M.G. Le Clézio and a Patrick Modiano, which was evidence of a wearing retreat into a provincial, post-war European vision, one curiously at odds with the epoch being lived by the vast majority of the world’s citizens, of technological innovation, ever-imaginative forms of state terror and modern, industrial forms of violence and devastation.

It seemed the Nobel committee was reluctant to recognise that Europe was no longer the centre of economic and intellectual ferment, that countries such as India and China would shape the destiny of our still-nascent century far more than the Old Continent. Yet in an era of Europe’s rapidly declining significance to the world at large, 15 of the past 20 Laureates (before Dylan) were European. In 2008, in a statement that might have been true five decades previously, Horace Engdahl, the then-permanent secretary of the Nobel committee, said, “Europe is still the centre of the literary world.”

However, awarding the prize to Dylan, and last year to the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, allow us to tentatively suggest that the Nobel’s horizons, at last, may be becoming more expansive and modern.

The prize to Alexievich, a worthy successor to the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, gave a clue to the Nobel committee’s changing priorities. In a piece in the New Yorker, ‘Nonfiction Wins a Nobel,’ the writer Philip Gourevitch quoted from one of Alexievich’s essays in which she declared that “art has failed to understand many things about people.” Alexievich argued that, in our present age, “when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified,” journalistic documentation remained the best way of representing reality, while “art as such often proves impotent.”

Capturing our age

In his piece, Gourevitch narrated another fascinating exchange at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York where Alexievich stated: “I’d like to remember the great Chekhov, and his play ‘The Three Sisters.’ The main character in that play says over and over, ‘Now life is terrible, we live in squalor, but in a hundred years, a hundred years, how beautiful, how fine everything will be.’ And what has happened a hundred years later? We have Chernobyl; we have the World Trade Towers collapsing. It’s a new age in history. What we have experienced now not only goes beyond our knowledge but also exceeds our ability to imagine.”

Alexievich’s prize was, in a sense, the Nobel committee’s acknowledgement of a long-overdue corrective. Dylan’s award furthers that process, as if the Nobel committee was hastily making amends for the decidedly narrow prism with which it viewed the artistic and cultural ferment of the past half-century. In the space of two years, the Nobel seems to have shed decades of conservatism, and twice redefined what it considers — and what we must consider — ‘literature’.

It is also a powerful reinforcement of the oral tradition, the primary method of literary dissemination through the centuries, before the onslaught of print capitalism in the West began relegating it to the margins from the eighteenth century onwards. Salman Rushdie, delighted by Dylan’s prize, told theGuardian: “The frontiers of literature keep widening and it’s exciting that the Nobel prize recognises that.” What a blow for diversity of literary forms that, to access the latest Laureate’s work, we had to go to iTunes instead of Amazon.

Dylan’s award may be something we may never see repeated, for he is a truly singular figure: a prophetic bard whose songs contained the force of immediacy, but were simultaneously universal and timeless. Some of the best music critics of our time, such as Alex Ross and David Hajdu, have written of Dylan’s dexterity and towering influence across genres, which include blues, folk and rock-and-roll. The Nobel committee said they were giving the prize to Dylan as “a great poet in the great English tradition, stretching from Milton and Blake onwards.” Some have even interpreted it as a lofty rebuke to the sleazy, dismaying political climate in the age of Trump.

Of equal relevance to the world of letters at large may be Dylan’s stubborn refusal to become a pamphleteer and an easy vehicle for the partisan political passions of his age. A seer born of the counterculture of the 1950s and ’60s, Dylan yet remained sceptical of the evangelist temper of anti-establishment politics and the constricting nature of political categories, animated by an Orwellian distrust of Utopias and wary of the artistic perils of political allegiance.

‘A song and dance man’
In his farsighted suspicion of all “isms” that ravaged the twentieth century, and in his demurral to be a spokesman for anything at all, Dylan’s life has been a compelling case for an inalienable devotion to the integrity and autonomy of the artist. Perhaps there has been no greater, and simpler, expression of artistic independence than Dylan’s declaration that “I am just a song and dance man.”

No composer or songwriter is likely to win the prize again for a long while, but Dylan’s prize is significant for it heralds the Literature Nobel’s belated transition into the modern age. Zorn, the columnist in the Chicago Tribune, triumphantly noted that nineteen years too late, Dylan had finally got what he deserved. There are more correctives for the prize to make, such as overcoming the still dominant spell of Eurocentrism. But the literature prize, conceived in the nineteenth century, finally seems to be embracing the twenty-first.

Cricket: How to play spin

Sanjay Manjrekar in Cricinfo


Going into this grand home season for Indian Test cricket, many felt that India would find New Zealand the toughest team to beat. As it turned out, the New Zealand spinners were not all that potent and their batsmen did not quite measure up either. In the end it was a clean sweep for India, and with big margins too.

To be fair, you could say New Zealand did the best with what they had. Not once during the course of the three Tests did you get the impression that they were giving anything but 100%.

Their tactics were admirable. Throughout the series, you saw a definite, sensible plan in motion, one based on a sound study of Indian conditions and players. The problem was New Zealand's quality of execution, and it eventually came down to ability. In these conditions, the Indians were just more able, more skilled than New Zealand, and that decides the fate of a contest.

More than their bowling I was disappointed with the New Zealand batting, especially against spin. And this can be said of a few other teams too: the world is not playing spin too well these days.

The first and most basic thought when facing up to spin, especially on a turning pitch, is to try and judge the length of the ball. This has to be the only thought occupying your mind, nothing else.

Is this ball full or short? Depending on the length, you play forward or back. Watching batsmen play spin these days, I don't think enough importance is given to this thought. Maybe other ideas cloud their minds.

There is a chance you will survive on a seaming pitch without moving your feet too much, but on a turning pitch against good spinners, if you are not moving your feet, you have no chance.

The thing is, you can't attack your way out of trouble against spin. We saw this approach predictably fail when Ross Taylor tried it in the final innings of the series.

Reading what is coming out of the hand is not as necessary as it is to judge the length, and depending on it, playing off the front foot or back. Kane Williamson was the best at this for New Zealand.

The idea after that is to get the bat right to the pitch of the ball: even if you can't stretch forward too much to get your foot to the pitch of the ball, you need to get the bat right to where the ball has landed. Mohammad Azharuddin used to do this. He never stretched his front foot too far forward but ensured that the bat was still very close to the pitch of the ball. If you do this, you don't have to worry which way the ball is going to spin.

When you are unable to get the bat to where the ball has pitched, you need to go right back deep inside the batting crease, a la Virat Kohli, and then watch the ball off the pitch - which you should have time to do, since you have gone right back.

Despite your best intentions, there will be many occasions when you err in your judgement of the length and are caught half-forward, not quite to the pitch of the ball. This is when alarm bells must ring in your head, and you must become extremely wary of the ball, like you would with a deadly poisonous snake, for you have given it a chance to strike at you.

You now have to make a small, critical adjustment with just the bat; it's too late to do anything with your feet now. You have to be ready to quickly draw the bat away and not play the ball, open or close the face of the bat or simply change the original position of the bat depending on the behavior of the ball. It's like how a keeper changes his glove position when he is up to the stumps, as opposed to standing back, and there is a deflection off the bat.

When not to the pitch, I found there were far too many New Zealand batsmen offering rigid bats that did not change their original position if there was a change in ball behaviour. They were hoping that the ball would hit the centre of their bats. This is a recipe for disaster.

These limitations of the New Zealand batsmen should take no credit away from R Ashwin, nor should his performance be given less credit because it has come at home.

To start with, this series didn't have rank turners where all a spinner had to do was turn up. The jury is out on how Ashwin will fare overseas, but his returns in favourable conditions are mind-boggling, and his performance in this series has been truly praiseworthy. If a batsman gets 20 hundreds in 39 matches we call it Bradmanesque; what do we call this?

I stumbled on a remarkable difference between Ashwin and Harbhajan Singh with regards to their modes of dismissals.

When Harbhajan was at the 200-wickets mark in his career, he had a total of 47 lbws and bowleds. Ashwin at the same stage had 90, almost twice as many as Harbhajan.

This is no comment on who is better. Harbhajan will have had more bat-pad dismissals than Ashwin. But this is an important reason why Ashwin has a greater strike rate: along with bat-pad dismissals, he gives himself the opportunity to get lbws and bowleds too. He is willing to experiment and find new ways of getting wickets, while Harbhajan was quite one-dimensional and rarely had a plan B.

Finally, it was a delight to see Virat Kohli maturing quickly as a captain, in keeping with his rapid growth as a batsman in international cricket.

This observation does not come because he has just won a Test series; it is more to do with how he has been visibly more patient, when earlier his almost child-like exuberance seemed to get the better of him. The tendency to make frequent field and bowling changes seems to have gone now. Kohli's on-field tactics this series had the perfect blend of attack and defence; not once did it seem like he was over-attacking or ultra-defensive.

His cheerleading to get the crowd to make some noise and back his team up when things were quiet was a nice touch. Why, some fans might come to the ground just to be cheer-led by him.

Kohli was in the game every minute of the series.

Above all, for someone who is very much a modern-day product, in the way he looks and plays the other formats of the game, he showed he cares deeply for the five-day game. And that is a boon in these times for Test cricket.

Don’t call for another referendum – they cause more problems than they solve

Amol Rajan in The Independent


Many journalists ply their trade because it is politics by other means. I joined this profession for several reasons, including the need to make a living and the absence of suitable alternatives. But one of the main reasons was that I believe very strongly in democracy – a political idea – because it is a way of diffusing power so that it is not just concentrated among the rich and the few.

As a democrat, even a radical democrat, for years I harboured an instinctive fondness for referendums. Give the people a say. Let them decide. All that stuff. But judging by the experience of Britain's most recent referendum, I have changed my mind. I now think fewer would be preferable.

This is not necessarily because I think the wrong result transpired. Rather it is because I can see the problems with referendums more clearly now. I reckon there are at least four.

First, they too often turn on variables unrelated to the question at hand, such as whether a particular leader is popular that month. Colombia's rejection of a peace deal may have turned on the weather. 

Second, they give excessive influence and airtime to single-issue campaigners and fringe groups who don't belong in, or represent, the mainstream.

Third, they reduce very complex issues to binary decisions, ignoring the fact that politics is full of trade-offs; leaving the European Union, for instance, can mean many different things.

Here's just such a trade-off: you can lower immigration levels, but you'll be poorer in the short-term as you probably have to leave the single market. It's what people voted for – even if they didn't realise it. But now there's a huge move in parliament to pretend this trade-off didn't happen. You see it in the intellectually docile terminology of hard versus soft Brexit, as if there were only two options from the infinite variety of potential end results to the coming negotiation.

And that is the fourth problem with referendums: the losers often have nowhere to go. You end up with a hugely disenfranchised constituency, who are either agitating for another go or nurse such a constant grievance that they undermine the whole electoral system. That is what is happening now.

It is right and proper that parliament should scrutinise the negotiation undertaken by Theresa May and her team, but what cannot happen is a re-run of the EU referendum. The result is in – and it is clear. Yet the attempt to cobble together a parliamentary coalition against leaving the single market is a giant festival of sour grapes masquerading as patriotism and belief in democracy.

The shenanigans this week illustrate exquisitely how, far from encouraging participation and supporting democracy, referendums generally end up subverting it.

Brexit – that dreaded, bizarre word, simultaneously so empty and so full – has come to define this government though nobody knows what it means and nobody has a clue how to deliver it. Under the guise of fortifying our democracy, it has started to consume it. That's not what plebiscites are meant to do.

Tum Toh Dil Ke Taar Chhed Kar

The Lata/Waheeda version

The Talat/Dev Anand version

The numbers behind dropped catches and missed stumpings

Charles Davis in Cricinfo 

For all its bewildering array of data, cricket statistics still has a few blind spots. One of the most obvious is in the area of missed chances, where there have been few extensive studies. Gerald Brodribb in Next Man In mentioned that statistician RH Campbell estimated that 30% of catches were missed in Tests in the 1920s. I have seen a figure of more than 30 dropped catches by West Indies in Australia in 1968-69, a team plagued by poor fielding. But really basic questions like "Overall, what percentage of chances are dropped?" lack answers.

For a number of years I have collected all the missed chances I could find in ESPNcricinfo's ball-by-ball texts for Test matches. Since the site does not always use standard terms to describe missed chances, and different ball-by-ball commentators have their own ways of expressing themselves, I searched the text for 40 or more words and phrases that might indicate a miss, from "drop" and "dolly" to "shell", "grass" and "hash". The process generally flagged about 100 to 200 lines in the commentary for each Test, which I then searched manually to identify real chances. For some Tests, I also confirmed data by checking match reports and other ball-by-ball sources.

While the commentary goes back to 1999, the textual detail can be patchy in the early years. I logged missed chances from late 2000 onwards, but consider that data to be substantially complete only from 2003. I have compiled a list of over 4000 missed chances in Tests from this century; about a third of all Tests (635) are represented.

Unavoidably, there are caveats. Sometimes opinions may vary as to whether a chance should be considered a miss. I take a hard line: "half", "technical" and "academic" chances are included, and I try to include any chances where the fielder failed to touch the ball but should have done so, if they can be identified. Edges passing between the wicketkeeper and first slip are considered chances even if no one has touched the ball. Since 2005, I have divided chances into two categories, "normal" and "difficult", according to how they are described. About half fall into each category.

There will always be uncertainty about some dropped catches, as there is always the possibility that some others have been overlooked. However, as long as the collection method is as consistent and exhaustive as possible, I would argue that a great majority of misses have been identified and that the data can be collated into useful statistics.

So back to the original question: how many chances are dropped? The answer is about one-quarter; typically seven missed chances per Test. Here is a table showing missed chances by country.

Percentage of catches and stumpings missed from 2003 to 2015

Fielding team	2003-2009	2010-2015
New Zealand	23.6%	21.4%
South Africa	20.9%	21.6%
Australia	23.2%	21.8%
England	25.5%	24.8%
West Indies	30.5%	25.4%
Sri Lanka	25.3%	26.8%
India	24.6%	27.2%
Pakistan	30.8%	30.2%
Zimbabwe	27.1%	31.9%
Bangladesh	33.3%	33.1%

The difference between the top three countries in the last five years is not significant; however, there are more substantial differences down the list. Generally, Bangladesh have had the weakest catching record since they started in Test cricket, although there are recent signs of improvement. Other countries have had fluctuating fortunes. West Indies had a miss rate of over 30% from 2003 to 2009, but have tightened up their game in the last couple of years. India have seen a rate of 33% in 2013 fall to 23% in 2015, and Sri Lanka have also improved their catching significantly in just the last two years.

In some years, countries like Australia, South Africa and New Zealand have seen their rates drop below 20%; the best single-year result was 16.9% by South Africa in 2013, when they were the No. 1-ranked team in Tests. In good years, the proportion of dropped catches rated as "difficult" generally increases; good teams still miss the hard ones but drop fewer easy ones. Typically, two-thirds of Australia's missed chances are rated as difficult, but the same applies to only one-third of Bangladesh's missed chances.

The lucky

As a batsman's innings progresses, the odds of him offering a chance increase. About 72% of batsmen reaching 50 do so without giving a chance, but the percentage for century-makers is 56% in the first 100 runs. Only 33% of double-centuries are chanceless in the first 200 runs. The highest absolutely chanceless innings is 374 by Mahela Jayawardene in Colombo; Lara's 400 in Antigua contained a couple of "academic" chances.

The most expensive missed chance since the start of 2000 is 297 runs for Inzamam-ul-Haq, who made 329 after being missed on 32 in Lahore in 2002. Historically there have been more expensive misses: Mark Taylor (334 not out) was dropped on 18 and 27 by Saeed Anwar, and there was a missed stumping on 40 for Len Hutton (364) in 1938. Perhaps even luckier was Kumar Sangakkara, who made 270 in Bulawayo after being dropped on 0. Sachin Tendulkar was dropped on 0 when he made his highest score, 248 not out in Dhaka. Mike Hussey gave a possible chance first ball at the Gabba in 2010, and went on to make 195. Graham Gooch was famously dropped by Kiran More when on 36 at Lord's in 1990. He went on to make 333.

The data turns up four batsmen who have been dropped five times in an innings: one was Andy Blignaut, whose 84 not out in Harare in 2005 included an extremely rare hat-trick of dropped catches; Zaheer Khan was the unhappy bowler. (There was also a hat-trick of missed chances at Old Trafford in 1972, when two batsmen survived against Geoff Arnold.) The others who have been missed five times are Hashim Amla (253 in Nagpur, 2010), Taufeeq Umar (135 in St Kitts, 2011) and Kane Williamson (242 not out in Wellington, 2014). Nothing in this century quite matches the seven or eight missed catches (reports vary) off George Bonnor when he made 87 in Sydney in 1883, or six misses off Bill Ponsford in his 266 at The Oval in 1934 (as recorded by veteran scorer Bill Ferguson). Wavell Hinds was dropped twice at the MCG in 2000, and still made a duck.

The batsman with most reprieves in the study period is Virender Sehwag, missed 68 times, just one ahead of Sangakkara. About 37% of the chances Sehwag offered were dropped, which is well above average and probably a testament to the power of his hitting.
The unlucky

Broadly, spin bowlers suffer more from dropped catches and (of course) missed stumpings. Chances at short leg, along with caught and bowled, have the highest miss rates among fielding positions, and these positions happen to feature more strongly among spinners' wickets than pace bowlers'. Overall, 27% of chances off spin bowlers are missed, as against 23% of chances off pace bowlers.

In the study period, the bowlers with the most missed chances in Tests are Harbhajan Singh (99) and Danish Kaneria (93). Harbhajan has had 26 chances missed at short leg alone. Bear in mind that these bowlers' careers are not fully covered; the data for about 10% of Harbhajan's career is not available to analyse. Pace bowlers with the most misses, as of January 2016, are Jimmy Anderson (89) and Stuart Broad (85).

Spare a thought for James Tredwell, who has played only two Tests but suffered ten missed chances, including seven on debut, the most for any bowler since the start of 2000. Most were very difficult, with three of them missed by the bowler himself. Also worth mentioning is Zulfiqar Babar, who has had 30 chances missed in his Test career and only 28 catches (and stumpings) taken.

At the other end of the scale, Adil Rashid has had eight catches taken off his bowling with no misses (as of August 2016). Neil Wagner of New Zealand has had only seven misses out of 63 chances, a rate of 11%.

Two bowlers have had catches missed off their first ball in Test cricket: David Warner (Dean Brownlie dropped by James Pattinson, Brisbane, 2011) and RP Singh (Shoaib Malik dropped by Anil Kumble, Faisalabad, 2006).

There is an intriguing case from 1990. Against West Indies in Lahore, Wasim Akram took four wickets in five balls: W, W, 1, W, W. In a surviving scorebook, the single, by Ian Bishop, is marked as a dropped catch at mid-on. If so, Akram came within a hair's breadth of five wickets in five balls, since the batsmen crossed, and Bishop did not face again. (Wisden, it should be noted, says that the catch was out of reach.)

The guilty

When it comes to catching, some positions are much more challenging than others. That will come as no surprise, but putting some numbers to this is an interesting exercise. The table below shows the miss rate for different field positions.
 

hances by position (December 2008 to January 2016)

Position	Chances	% Missed
Keeper (ct)	2188	15%
Stumping	254	36%
Slip	2062	29%
Gully	404	30%
Third man	36	17%
Point	371	29%
Cover	319	23%
Mid-off	253	20%
Bowler	378	47%
Mid-on	340	22%
Midwicket	455	23%
Short leg	518	38%
Square leg	286	19%
Fine leg	170	30%

The highest miss rates are seen for caught and bowled, and for catches at short leg. Bowlers lack the luxury of setting themselves up for catches, while short leg has the least time of any position to react to a ball hit well. Many of the chances there are described as half-chances or technical. Slips catches are twice as likely to be dropped as wicketkeepers' catches, a measure of the advantage of gloves.

However, it would be unwise to read too much into the table above. Slip fielders or short-leg fielders are not inferior to those at mid-off; they get much more difficult chances. In the period of the study, Alastair Cook missed more chances than any other non-wicketkeeper, some 62 misses, but since many of his misses came at short leg, his miss rate doesn't look so bad.

While comparing lapse rates of different fielders is risky, it is worth mentioning Graeme Smith, whose drop rate of only 14% is the best among long-serving players by a considerable margin. Between August 2012 and February 2013, Smith took 25 catches and recorded no missed chances. Other slip fielders with outstanding catching records include Andrew Strauss and Ross Taylor on 20%, Michael Clarke on 21%, and Ricky Ponting on 22%. Elsewhere in the field, Warner at one stage took 20 consecutive chances that came to him.

Of those who have recorded more drops than catches, Umar Gul leads the list, with 11 catches and 14 misses. In 2014, Mushfiqur Rahim missed ten consecutive chances that came his way. Oddly enough, he caught his next 13 chances. Kevin Pietersen came to Test cricket with a fine catching reputation, but he dropped the first seven chances that came to him. He then caught his next 16 chances. The most missed chances in a match for one team, in this data set, is 12 by India against England in Mumbai in 2006. The most missed chances in an innings is nine by Pakistan against England in Faisalabad in 2005, and also by Bangladesh against Pakistan in Dhaka in 2011. In Karachi in 2009, Mahela Jayawardene (240) was dropped on 17 and 43, Thilan Samaraweera (231) was dropped on 73 and 77, and Younis Khan (313) was dropped on 92. The combined cost of all the missed chances in the match was 1152 runs, or 684 runs based on "first" drops off each of the batsmen.

There is some evidence of "contagious" butterfingers in teams. In the second Test of the 1985 series in Colombo, India dropped seven catches against Sri Lanka on the first day, on which the only wicket to fall was thanks to a run-out. India also dropped six catches in the space of ten overs in Rawalpindi in 2004, five of them coming in the first hour of the fourth day. It is rare enough for six chances to be offered at all in the space of ten overs at all, let alone to see all of them missed.

Behind the stumps

Here is some data on the miss rates, including stumpings, of various wicketkeepers of the 21st century. Not all are listed, but those with particularly low or high drop rates are given. 

Missed chances by keepers

	Chances	%Miss
Mark Boucher	364	10%
BJ Watling	119	11%
Tatenda Taibu	57	11%
AB de Villiers	94	11%
Adam Gilchrist	357	12%
Kamran Akmal	203	20%
Sarfraz Ahmed	63	21%
Dinesh Karthik	50	22%
Adnan Akmal	77	22%
Mushfiqur Rahim	86	32%

The wicketkeeper with the most misses is MS Dhoni with 66 (18%). In his defence, Dhoni had to deal with a high percentage of spin bowling, which presents a much greater challenge for keepers. Miss rates for leading wicketkeepers off spinners average around 30%, for both catches and stumpings, but it is only 10% for catches off pace bowlers. It can certainly be argued that keeping to spinners is the true test of a keeper.

It is not uncommon for keepers to start with a bang but fade later in their careers. Boucher, Watling, Gilchrist and de Villiers all had miss rates in single digits earlier in their careers. Gilchrist's miss rate rose in the last couple of years before his retirement. Others with very low rates, who did not qualify for the table, include Peter Nevill and Chris Read, on 7%. Read, to my eye, was one of the best modern wicketkeepers, but he did not get very many opportunities since he was unable to score enough runs to hold his place.


A short history of dropped catches

In addition to the data for the 21st century I have gathered data from other periods of Test history, using scorebooks that recorded dropped catches. The best sources are scorebooks by Bill Ferguson in the 1910s and 1920s, and by Bill Frindall from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. I have also used a limited number of other sources, including scores by Irving Rosenwater and some by Pakistan TV scorers. I have extracted data from about 200 Test scores in all, dating from before 1999.

Again, there must be caveats. We cannot be sure that the judging of dropped catches was on the same terms throughout, and we cannot be sure of the effect of TV replays on these assessments. I would say, however, that in the case of Frindall we have a meticulous observer with a very consistent style over multiple decades.

Once again, it would be unwise to read too much into each little blip in the data, but in general there is a trend toward lower rates of missed chances. The trend would probably be steeper if the data was limited to Australia and England, as the recent data includes countries such as Bangladesh that have had little or no coverage in earlier decades.

I might add an opinion from decades of observation: I believe that the greatest area of improvement has been with weaker fielders. Today everyone, including those with limited skills, has to do extensive fielding drills and take that part of the game very seriously. This has been one effect of the one-day game. In past decades many took fielding seriously. Jack Hobbs, Don Bradman and Neil Harvey worked hard at it, and I doubt if any player today works as hard on fielding as Colin Bland did in the 1960s (Bland would spend hours picking up and throwing a ball at a single stump: his record of run-outs is superior to that of anyone today). However, there were also players who did much less work on their fielding skills. In the modern game there is nowhere to hide, and everyone must put in the training effort. As a result, overall standards have risen.

Grammar schools are unfair. Principled parents must refuse to encourage them

Louise Tickle in The Guardian


 
‘A gentle challenge will often prompt the mantra that’s endlessly parroted to justify a parent’s principles turning to dust in the lead-up to the 11-plus exam. ‘You have to do the best by your child, don’t you?’’ Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
  

When my son was six months old, I agreed to move to Gloucestershire. It’s lovely here in the Stroud Valleys – or it is until your child reaches the second half of primary school, and everyday chats about school stuff with friends suddenly start to veer off into shamefaced mumbles about tutoring, and how if Charlie or Clara want to take the 11-plus with their mates, “then who are we to stop them?”

You’re their parents, who make a heap of choices about your children’s lives based on your political beliefs, is my answer. So why crumble now?

As an education journalist who is opposed to selection – because it disproportionately benefits an already vastly advantaged middle-class minority, and actively harms the educational prospects of other, often poorer children – I find negotiating these conversations with people I know painfully fraught. I have not yet found a polite way to tell a friend who allows their child to take the 11-plus that, while I cling to the idea that they are not at heart a shit, they are doing an exceedingly shitty thing.

A gentle challenge will often prompt the mantra that’s endlessly parroted to justify a parent’s principles turning to dust in the lead-up to the 11-plus exam. “You have to do the best by your child, don’t you?” is intoned with a phlegmatic sigh, lips pressed together in wry acknowledgment that the situation isn’t ideal, but life’s a bitch, and one’s own child’s interests – obviously– trump every other consideration. The listener’s agreement is automatically assumed.

No, I increasingly want to yell. Given that their offspring, and pretty much all their friends, are among the luckiest children in the history of humankind, choosing to construct a more divided society via our taxpayer-funded education system that disadvantages other kids – some with unimaginably difficult home lives that make it harder for them to do well at school – is not something I think should be encouraged. But it appears to be viewed as aberrant or just plain weird by many middle-class parents not to grab every possible personal advantage and hug it tight to the family bosom, while still maintaining they want the best for all.

We’re animals. I get it. We’re programmed to chase advantage for our young, even to the detriment of other people’s children. And so while it’s particularly pernicious that some parents pay for months, sometimes years, of tutoring to get their child through an exam that they might well otherwise fail, I know it’s because they are desperate to secure for their child any extra benefit going in a country that is becoming ever more unequal.

But inside, I seethe. Often I do so silently, because with so many parents actively pursuing the advantages that selection confers, confronting them has become deeply socially uncomfortable.It’s incongruent with many people’s view of themselves as good folk who believe in fairness and equality. And facing this paradox head-on in conversation has, in my experience, become something of a taboo: how do you call out friends and stay friends, when you’re accusing them of hurting other people’s children? I try, but the discomfort it prompts is palpable, and defensiveness is rife. The fact that researchers have concluded that there is “no benefit to attending a grammar school for high-attaining pupils” makes the unedifying scrabble even more sad.

It’s the system that stinks, of course, and it has to be fought at the policy level, not by individuals at the school gates. Parents mustn’t set themselves against each other. While that is true, it doesn’t let parents off the hook. It may be possible – I guess – to be opposed to selection in principle even while sending your children to a grammar school. Yet in practice parents cannot challenge a system with any authority when they have cut the ground from beneath their own feet. When prominent people such as Shami Chakrabarti express concerns about selectionand then admit they opt out and write a fat cheque when it comes to their own kids, asking ordinary parents to stand up and be counted becomes tricky. Within the education sector too, people give up their power by acquiescing with a system they think is wrong: I know a headteacher who believes passionately in comprehensive education, whose child attends the local grammar: it is now impossible for that head to speak out without being called a hypocrite. We all make compromises in life, but this one comes at a high price paid by children who aren’t “selected” and who have no power and no say.

No unfair system was ever overturned by people carrying on using it for their own selfish ends while spouting their dismay. If the government sees parents urgently ushering their children into the 11-plus queue, then there is no debate left to win. Arguments against selection are fatally compromised when the very people one might normally expect to challenge unfairness, and who have the political heft to do it – articulate, middle-class parents – wave Charlie and Clara off to the local grammar every morning and, perfectly understandably, then feel too embarrassed to raise their voices.