Cricket: Tim Southee and those flawless bucket hands

Tim Southee snaffles another catch. Photo / Getty Images

Remember when Tim Southee dropped that catch?

No, didn't think so.

Cricket tragics know the value of this exercise.

Ask yourself a random piece of stats trivia, then trawl your mental archive piecing together evidence for and against your hypothesis.

The idea of Southee's catching prowess embedded itself with his casual take of a David Warner edge in the first night session of the inaugural day-night test in Adelaide. Much had been made of the difficulty sighting the pink ball in the evening, yet Southee snaffled it at third slip as though someone had lobbed a tennis ball.

Enquiring 'Tim Southee dropped catch' on Google can't find so much as a video freeze frame where his magnet mitts have failed him.

Project Butterfingers starts to get desperate. Can we include instances when he employs his party trick of hauling in balls about to go for six and flicking them back into team-mates' hands?

One example came when Adil Rashid launched Nathan McCullum towards long on in the second New Zealand-England one-day international at the Oval this year.

Southee took the catch, tiptoed next to the boundary rope before flicking in-field to Trent Boult, who loomed in support like an openside flanker in rugby. The casualness was enviable as they jogged back to greet incredulous team-mates.

"If that had gone for six, I'm sure they [England] would have backed themselves to get 18 [off the last over]. Tim had taken a couple of similar screamers in India. It was a well-timed jump from Boulty, too, but after I dropped a catch off Tim [when Rashid was seven], I said that he had technically dropped a catch as well," Ross Taylor quipped.

Southee's CV for such acts also includes an Indian Premier League doozy for Rajasthan Royals this year when he dived, caught the ball one-handed and flicked back to Karun Nair.

However, New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum's preference to place Southee at third slip whenever possible underlines his real value.

It tends to be a position in which you've either got the requisite soft hands under pressure or the reactions of an Easter Island statue.

While cricket can mine all manner of data on batting and bowling, fielding statistics are more fickle. Catches (both those taken and dropped) and the positions where those opportunities presented themselves are a struggle to compile in forensic detail.

Fast bowlers rarely feature at the top of fielding charts anyway.

Tradition holds that batsmen dominate the catches-per-innings columns because they are more often tasked with standing in the slip cordon. Bowlers tend to be consigned to patrol fine leg or mid-off and mid-on where the ball ventures less in the air, particularly early on.

Yet Southee, with 28 catches from 84 test innings (0.333 per innings) sits behind just Lance Cairns (0.384 - 30 from 78 innings) and Tony MacGibbon (0.342 - 13 from 38 innings) in the New Zealand test pace bowler catching ranks for dismissals per innings.

It's a supplementary skill New Zealand are fortunate to call on.