Following Ben Foakes’ superb series in Sri Lanka, and with more data now available to assess the true worth of glovework, Wisden Cricket Monthly columnist Jonathan Liew says we could be entering a new golden age of wicketkeeping.

There’s a concept in pop culture known as the 40-year rule, by which social trends and motifs tend to recur around four decades after they first happened. The Swinging Sixties was really a reboot of the Roaring Twenties. The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring were really reiterations of the popular waves of protest that swept the planet in the late 1960s. Jacob Rees-Mogg is simply a virulent reincarnation of Dutch elm disease. Et cetera.

Occasionally, you can spot similar patterns in cricket. The resurgence of spin bowling in the 1990s mirrored the golden age of Laker, Ramadhin and Tayfield. The one-day revolution in the 1960s foreshadowed the rise of T20 four decades later. And to watch Ben Foakes gliding elegantly behind the stumps in Sri Lanka was to wonder whether another great nostalgic wave may be looming on the horizon: the return of the pure keeper.

Who are today’s pure keepers? BJ Watling of New Zealand is a personal favourite, all quick feet and wiry effervescence. Tim Paine has a fine pair of hands. India’s Wriddhiman Saha is probably the best in Asia. Shane Dowrich of the West Indies will be extremely good if he can find some consistency. Alec Stewart believes Foakes is already the best in the world. Adam Gilchrist reckons it’s the magical Sarah Taylor.

It is, as Jack Russell once put it, “our own little nutty world”: a skill few outsiders can truly appreciate, an obsession few lay people can truly grasp. In a way, keeping is cricket’s last knowledge frontier: the foamy wave where numbers and aesthetics collide, the no-man’s-land between old art and new science.

Featured photograph credit: Philip Brown