Basics of Wicket Keeping

We have been working on the club wicket keepers and various aspects of the technique have popped up:
1. Catching areas, what affects this? In the keepers posture some of them made an ‘O’ shape with their hands so the finger ends point towards where the ball is coming from and the thumbs meet at the top like the image below (Check the blog entry for all images and please bear in mind this wicket keeper starts in this position but does spread his hands later, it is just an example).
The problem for this for young keepers was the size of the catching area was smaller, they had to be very precise and a lot of the time they were finding they were getting hit on the finger ends or their catching area got even smaller if they tilted their wrists in any other direction than the ball was coming to them from.
Our Wicket keeping guru Paul advises that the hands spread with the little fingers crossing over slightly (or not – personal preference), with the thumbs spread far apart on the opposite side of the catching area like the image of Sarah Taylor
One thing that can affect the catching area is the length of the arms as you take the catch itself, if you extend your arms in front of you with the palms facing forward in the position Sarah is in with her hands, as the arms come closer to your chest/stomach, for the elbow to get around the body they separate, as this happens what happens to your catching area?
When we watched back how the players were taking the balls we found they were quickly moving the arms back and taking the ball a lot closer to their body than we would have liked; thus reducing their catching area.
2. Posture, why do we want good posture? Every keeper’s posture varies, they naturally catch the ball at different heights to each other, so we slightly adapt according to the player. What we do want is an athletic position to move from so we can open the hips if required, or move sideways with speed to make the taking of the catch easier.
A lot of them had their bum a long way below their knee height which made it tougher to move and they hunched their backs too. Some had the exact same posture standing up as they did back, so either standing back posture and missing low balls standing up, or standing with the hands on the floor when standing back.
Standing Back
We asked the Wicket Keepers to get their knees inside the feet when looking at them from front on, left to right so the knees are closer to each other than the feet are.
Depending on what height they felt comfortable catching the ball they would keep their back straight so their head could tilt up and see the ball clearly. The Keepers who liked to catch the ball Knee height would touch their knees with their elbows from their Z position stance, so their upper body tilts downward more.
The Keepers that preferred catching it thigh to belly button high touched their knees with straighter arms. Their upper body was more upright.
Either way the arms were extended for 2 reasons:
1. You can give with the ball as you take it.
2. The Angle of the wrist is important for injury prevention when taking the ball, if between the elbow and wrist the forearm is parallel to the floor, to present a good catching area you need to tilt the wrists downwards at a right angle, if the ball hits the heel of hand where the wrist is there is a risk of fracturing the wrist (obviously this depends on the speed of the delivery too). By lengthening the arms you get a softer angle at the wrists, this is less likely.
Standing Up
Back straight so the head can see what is happening, hands low so you only need to come upwards, left or right, rather than in 4 directions, a lot of our keepers were coming up too early and not with the bounce of the ball.
Our keeping specialist advocates keeping the feet parallel when standing up and taking the ball within or slightly away from the feet as you can get more power from the hips to return the hands back to the stumps. (He has done research into the time it takes to return the ball back to the stumps with various permutations of movements).
This image of Sarah Taylor examples this concept, a lot of keepers open their outside foot and can miss the off stump when returning to the stumps, so try and aim for middle stump as a habit.
3. Mindset
Catching the ball sounds simple but even when the batter is hitting it all the time anticipate that he will miss, try and get head and hands in line with the ball so you have a shorter movement to make to take a catch should it be edged.
A good example of this is Ben Scott here standing up to the stumps, notice how low his hands are, he anticipated the ball might beat the batter on the off side of the body so bends his left leg and straightens his right to get his head and hands in a line over to where the ball might be caught.
He was probably one of the most gifted keepers I have seen and I know that’s with some club bias but have a look at this set of clips – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRgG-81RJTY
By taking the head and hands across to any take the thin edge is a shorter distance for your hands to travel towards, the keepers we had at the club training left their head over their belly button and were struggling to take slight deflections.
4. Movement I can go into another time