Cameron Bancroft changes catchphrase from schemer to screamer

Steve Waugh says Cameron Bancroft is the best close-in fielder he has seen but history suggests there was one better.

Cameron Bancroft’s catch off England’s Rory Burns at short leg on day two at Lord’s has become an internet hit. Picture: Getty Images

Just as Steve Smith quelled the boos with his batting in Edgbaston, so Cameron Bancroft is laying the critics low with his fielding brilliance.

Redemption takes many forms: Bancroft’s breathtaking snaffle at short-leg at Lord’s has displaced “Cameron Bancroft ball-tampering” from the top of a Google search of his name.

“Cameron Bancroft catch” was spitting out 3.2 million results yesterday as the world beheld one of the great short-leg grabs.

When Bancroft did what several of his teammates could not — hold a chance from Rory Burns — he gave us an image that might define the 2019 Ashes, much as Steve Waugh’s cover drive was frozen in time after the Australians’ 4-0 win in 1989.

Diving back and to his left, Bancroft cushioned the ball in a hand practised in cradling it in a wicketkeeping glove.

The catch was the picture that added a thousand words to Waugh’s succinct review of Bancroft’s short-leg talents made before the series.

“The one thing I have been amazed by is Cameron Bancroft’s short-leg practice,” Waugh said.

“I had a session with him the other day and I’ve never seen anything like it. England beware because he’s the best short-leg I’ve ever seen.”

England beware indeed. The Lord’s Twitter account lauded the catch as one of the best seen at the home of cricket.

It may well have been, but it wasn’t the best short-leg catch taken in the 2019 Ashes — that was Tammy Beaumont’s stunner at Taunton in the women’s Test.

Beaumont, like Bancroft, has spent a lot of time behind the sticks as a keeper. Keepers are tough so-and-sos and a short-leg needs courage as much as they do quicksilver reflexes. Bancroft is being compared with David Boon and Simon Katich, both fine exponents of the bat-pad art. Boon of course held the short-leg catch to give Shane Warne his Ashes hat-trick in 1994.

Being low to the ground helps — see Beaumont and Boon.

And often short-legs are the victims of hierarchical circumstance — last player in gets the job.

According to the analysts at CricViz, Bancroft has held all 11 chances he’s had at short-leg, which is an extraordinary run.

But he has a way to go to usurp Vic Richardson as Australia’s greatest close-in fieldsman.

Richardson’s Australian Dictionary of Biography entry says that like Bancroft he was “reputed never to drop catches”, and was the first man to take five in a Test innings, at Durban, in 1935-36.

“Natural athleticism and superb reflexes made him a magnificent fieldsman — close to the wicket he was freakish, taking hard drives cleanly,” the ADB entry reads.

The Guardsman, as Richardson was known, was indeed fearless at silly-point, creeping as close as possible to the batsman without encroaching on the pitch. No helmets or voluminous shin pads in those days.

As captain of that 1935-36 tour of South Africa, Richardson called Bill Brown and Jack Fingleton in to join him in the batsmen’s eye line as the skipper tossed the ball to one of the several spinners in the Australian attack. The results were devastating. Clarrie Grimmett (44 wickets for the series), Bill O’Reilly (27) and Chuck Fleetwood-Smith — 4-64 on debut at Durban — bowled Australia to a 4-0 win in a five-Test series.

Neville Cardus later wrote that Fingleton and Brown crouched “low and acquisitively, each with as many arms as an Indian God”.