Dropping a catch or a fixture or a player are awkward parts of cricket. Being dropped can mean different things: it is helpful if you are a batsman and a fielder has failed to catch you but unhelpful if you are being dropped from the team or dropped as a club from someone else’s fixture list. Luckily, dropping players, in the sense of not picking people who are out of form, isn’t really how friendly club cricket works. We select teams to give members a fair chance and to give our opponents a decent game. We rotate our squad but never drop a player for lack of form.

Dropping people in the sense of not holding on to a catch, however, is quite frequent although I was the only person in today’s game to drop a catch. (It was coming at me like a rocket, of course …) Batsmen tend to think they are unlucky when a fielder takes a difficult catch but to gloss over the occasions on which they have survived through a fielder’s mistake, including in the same innings. Fielders and bowlers see it differently. The batsman today was soon out, which made me feel better, caught behind off the same bowler. He walked.

Dropped catches feature prominently in our match reports, with our reporters seemingly compelled to confess to dropping someone. See, for example,

http://www.middletonstoneycc.co.uk/club-news/2016/september/04/mscc-vs-turville-park-2016/

I recently went through a whole season either not batting or being not out, except once, amassing a total and an average of 39. If it had been a chanceless season, I wouldn’t have had an average at all so, on reflection, it was good that their fielder caught me, rather than dropped me. This moment was also caught on camera, embarrassingly, by a fellow resident of Middleton Park, the late Michael Martin, who seemed to capture every mistake, every season. Couldn’t he have dropped the camera, just this once?

If we dropped every fixture in which the opposition played for a draw, or needed us to make up their numbers, or didn’t want to play because it was drizzling when they woke up sixty miles away, then we would be a few fixtures short of a season. Today’s opponents, Old Leightonians, are the exact opposite, a talented side who play to win but with good grace, so we trust they will not drop us. They ended up losing this season but did so with their customary good grace, having travelled from as far as Cornwall, through rain.

Yet dropped catches, players or fixtures are not the most important kinds of dropping in cricket. My top three are, in ascending order, these …

Fielders subtly dropping back to be in position to take a catch is one of the joys of our sport.

Players prepared to drop out to give visiting strangers a game are an absolute delight:

http://www.middletonstoneycc.co.uk/club-news/2017/middleton-stoney-vs-great-missenden-pelicans-2017/

The best kind of dropping, though, in my 50 years of cricket captaincy has been the dropping of hints, a subtle element of leadership and camaraderie to which this blog shall return. Just saying.