I play cricket with William Fiennes. He is a brilliant wicketkeeper, a model of unfussy class in a team of enthusiastic amateurs. I’ve read his books too – beautiful, lyrical, thoughtful – and so when worlds collided and he sent in a piece about wicketkeeping, I was delighted, greedily lapping up every word. It is a wonderful piece; every word is carefully selected, perfectly balanced and some of the phrasing makes you catch your breath and want to share the joy with other people who love the game like you do…

Matt Thacker, managing editor of The Nightwatchman, Winter 2019 

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In the Winter 2019 issue of The Nightwatchman, William Fiennes pays tribute to the art of wicketkeeping.

My father had been a wicketkeeper, widely admired, playing at Lord’s aged 18 in the summer of 1939, maybe good enough for a county trial if war hadn’t barged in, and it was still in his bone and muscle memory in his eighties and nineties, throwing an apple up and catching it and nudging the bails off, or just miming a take to one side of the body, his fingers and palms opening into a bowl or cradle, a little give with the elbows as the ball invisibly landed, not “caught” so much as greeted and received, the evidence there when he held his hands up and you could see the fingers all crooked where balls had crocked the joints, corroborated too when old friends of his encountered with Rover tickets in the Warner or Allen stands would look down at me and remember not just my father’s batting but his keeping too: “A very good wicketkeeper, your father…”

So when at school they asked for a volunteer, I raised my hand. The gloves in the communal kitbags were huge, cumbersome gauntlets, sweat-soaked leather hardened in the off-season, the plastic finger guards like burly thimbles, the pimpled catching surface worn smooth and shiny. The chamois inner gloves were hard and creased when you first put them on but would melt and soften with sweat from your hands so that after a short sequence of catches the paraphernalia of inner and outer gloves seemed to meld with your own body and be forgotten.

I don’t remember any coaching, it was more a matter of imitation, mimicking the squats and nimble sidestep dances of Bob Taylor and Jeff Dujon, relishing not just their diving one-handed catches but the lovely soundless grace of the task done right, understanding from Dad that the point was to go beneath notice, taking each catch so cleanly the ball made no sound in the gloves, the good wicketkeeper dissolving into each passage of play with Zen-like self-effacement.

Small fires it at 80-odd clicks down leg, Jones tries to glance but misses, and in blink-speed Russell has followed his hands blind a couple of yards to his left and the bails are gone, Jones already walking. No way Jack Russell ran out that morning wondering how he was going to “get in the batsman’s head”. And Russell was dropped for the next Test, replaced by Alec Stewart, the superior batsman…

“Well taken”: I must have learned the phrase from my father, and that verb had resonance too – not “caught” but “taken”, as if each ball were a criticism or compliment the keeper had to absorb and process. It was more than catching. You made your broad, webbed hands into a berth or nest, and gave with the elbows to cushion the landing. The technique evolved to protect the palms from repeated heavy impacts – the ball a meat hammer tenderising the fillets – but origin stories didn’t matter when you saw or made those cradle shapes in the arms and the ball sank home so naturally you barely felt it. I don’t remember when I last really talked about wicketkeeping with my father.

Maybe it was around the time Russell faded from view, and Adam Gilchrist’s phenomenal impact as a batsman forced everyone to think differently about the keeper’s role – who cares about “flowing with the line” when you can score an Ashes century off 57 balls? But the conversation was still there when he lobbed an apple in the kitchen and made the stumping (Mum said he did the same when she threw him a pair of balled-up socks to put in his sock drawer) or held up his hands in silhouette with the window behind them, his fingers crooked like an old oak’s staghead branches, and in those dreamy bye-less afternoons when each catch landed true, all the half-volley throws, wides and leg-side surprises, Dad’s voice among my teammates’ saying: “Well taken, Will. Well taken.”