Save the Wicket Keepers

All of a sudden there is shortage of good wicket keepers in world cricket. Except for Adam Gilchrist and Tatenda Taibu there are no wicket keepers who are good enough to play international cricket. Fumbling with collections, dropping catches and missing stumpings are the order of the day. It wasn’t so not very long ago, every team, including weaker ones, had outstanding wicket keepers in their side. The man responsible for the present state of affairs is Adam Gilchrist.

Before the arrival of Adam Gilchrist the team expected its wicket keepers to keep wickets only. Gilchrist has changed all that, now wicket keepers are expected to be accomplished batsman as well. If you look at the career averages of wicket keepers of the earlier periods you will notice their batting averages to be in the range of mid twenties to mid thirties. Mid twenties was considered fair enough and mid thirties as outstanding. Not any more, everyone is now looking for a wicket with Adam’s average. Nothing wrong in that, after all look at the difference that Gilchrist’s has made to the performance and fortune of the Australian team. The problem arises in the failure to realise that Gilchrist’s is a special talent, a person with exceptional gift such cricketers cannot be produced or groomed they have to be born.

Both batting and wicket keeping are special skill jobs that need hours and hours of practice and hard work to attain perfection. Just as among allrounders you wouldn’t find some one who can bowl as brilliantly as Anil Kumbhle as well as bat like Sachin Tendulkar, one is either a bowling all rounder or a batting all rounder. So it is among wicket keepers, one can have either a brilliant wicket keeper and a mediocre batsman (as most wicket keepers earlier were) or brilliant batsman and mediocre wicket keeper (cf. Rahul Dravid).

Though wicket keepers are taken into the team on the basis of their wicket keeping but soon enough pressure builds upon the hapless chap to be like Adam Gilchrist. The horrible part is that the pressure comes from all corners, the media, team, selectors and cricket fans as well. As a result the person starts spending more time on improving his batting and neglecting his core competence, in the bargain he remains neither a test class wicket keeper nor a test class batsman. It happened with Deep Dasgupta and Parthiv Patel and is currently happening with Dinesh Karthik, Macuulam and Geriant Jones.

To save the vanishing tribe of wicket keepers we need to bring our expectations down to more realistic level.