1) Learie Constantine

“Years ago at Lord’s, in the first Test ever played with the West Indians in this country, Larwood began the second day batting against Constantine,” Neville Cardus wrote in the Guardian in 1933. “A ball of terrific pace jumped straight up and Larwood, shielding his breast, popped the ball in front of him. None of us thought the stroke was really a chance – we saw the ball in the air and said to ourselves, ‘If only the wicketkeeper had been closer up; if only point had been not quite so deep …’” At the other end, in the middle of his follow-through, Learie Constantine saw the ball loop up, and set off.”

Constantine was an excellent batsman and a phenomenal bowler, but his fielding was beyond compare. His reputation had been built and burnished earlier in that summer of 1928, with a virtuoso performance against Middlesex that turned an apparently impossible position – West Indies were 79 for five when he strode in to bat, in reply to Middlesex’s 352 for six dec – into a comfortable victory. The Times described the match as “a continuous triumph” for Constantine. “His fielding on the first day, his batting on the second, and his bowling and batting yesterday definitely established his claim to be considered as the most determined match-winning cricketer in the world,” they trilled. Later in the tour, during a game at Scarborough, he collected the ball at cover as the batsmen set off for a single and shied at the stumps at the bowler’s end; the batsman made his ground just before the ball hit the stumps and deflected to midwicket, and promptly set off for a second run. Meanwhile Constantine – having sprinted across the field in order to back up his own throw – fielded once more and nearly ran him out again.

When England travelled to West Indies two years later, in the first innings of the first Test he was responsible for three wickets as a bowler, and three as a fielder – “a trio of amazingly brilliant catches”, according to the Guardian, all taken at gully. First Patsy Hendren – “his alertness enabled him to snap up smartly the catch” – then Jack O’Connor – “hard, wide and low to his left hand” – then Ewart Astill – “high up with his right hand”. After a draw and a defeat, in the third match of the series he took nine wickets as his team frolicked to a first ever Test win by 289 runs.

By then he was based in Britain, where for nearly a decade he played for Nelson in the Lancashire League (which they won for seven of his nine years, totally without precedent; in a game against Accrington he took all 10 wickets for 10 runs), and remaining to become a leading campaigner for equal rights. He later became minister of works and transport in Trinidad, and high commissioner, was knighted in 1962, and in 1969 became the first life peer of African descent when he was named Lord Constantine of Maraval and Nelson.

In that 1933 article, entitled “genius in cricket”, Cardus attempts to capture the player’s action. “Constantine runs to the wicket for dear life, a bouncing, galloping sort of run,” he wrote. “When the ball leaves his arm … his run follows the ball, and you can never see where it ends and where exactly Constantine ceases to be a bowler and becomes a fieldsman. Constantine has brought off many a c&b which have beggared explanation and description. Apparently he has the power to be in two places at the same time.

“The movements of Constantine in the field are strange, almost primitive, in their pouncing voracity and unconscious beauty, a dynamic beauty, not one of smooth curves and relaxations. He does not run after a ball hit through the slips; he springs after it, swoops on it rather than picks it up. There are no bones in his body, only great charges and flows of energy. You cannot see some of his slip fielding, so rapid is his action. You hear the bat’s crack, and then you hear the ball crashing the stumps. He can catch anything.”

On another occasion, Cardus described the manner of one particular Constantine catch: “As primitive as a panther’s leap and as beautiful. Constantine’s zest was without bounds. Once he bowled a fast ball and dashed towards cover point and nearly ran a man out – the whole action, bowling and fielding, one and indivisible and rapid as thought!”

And so back, then, to Lord’s, and Constantine’s efforts to reach that looping ball. I’m afraid to report that he failed. “Lo and behold! Constantine came down the pitch in two glorious animal leaps, and he fell in front of the block-hole, missing the chance only by inches,” wrote Cardus. “The catch would have been the most unexpected ever made in cricket’s history, surely. The effort left us all breathless. Larwood stood there the picture of astonishment.”

[It seems cruel to point out here that the batsman was in fact not Larwood but Gloucestershire’s Harry Smith, in what was his only Test innings, though this is the only detail that differs between Cardus’ report in the following day’s paper, and his recollections five years later. “Constantine actually recovered position from the momentum of his bowling action, leaped down the pitch at least 16 yards and almost caught and bowled Smith,” he wrote on the earlier occasion. “Had he succeeded the catch would have been the most wonderful I have ever seen. No other bowler could have got anywhere near Smith’s stroke. No other bowler would have dreamed of attempting the catch, which well-nigh brought impossibility out of the infinite air and rendered it a possible fact of the finite earth.”]

Sometimes, though, success is not required to make an act of fieldsmanship remarkable. Occasionally the wit to perceive a moment’s potential and the athleticism to so much as attempt to realise it are enough to make it memorable. It is unlikely that anyone living can remember this incident, but it certainly seems to qualify. And so Constantine was forced to dust himself off and retreat to the start of his run-up, and Smith continued his innings – but only as long as it took for the very next delivery to, as the Times described it, “send the off stump dancing widdershin”. “The crowd,” Cardus reported, “cheered wildly at all this superb evidence of Constantine’s untamed and unconquerable spirit.”

Here, though, is a vaguely similar and considerably more recent moment. And Mitchell Johnson caught it. SB

2) Jonty Rhodes runs out Inzamam-ul-Haq (South Africa v Pakistan, 1992 World Cup)

It didn’t always take much to catch Inzamam-ul-Haq out of his ground. Patience was often the only quality required. So for a run-out dismissal of the ponderous Pakistan batsman in a rain-interrupted World Cup round-robin game to be remembered beyond stumps, it would have to be a pretty special run-out dismissal. And this was a very special-run out dismissal.

Jonty Rhodes had come into the fledgling South Africa side billed as the best Saffer fielder since Colin Bland. Then there were arguments about whether he was better than Bland. Then there were no arguments. “He is an india-rubber little chap with a clown’s expressive sallow face and the tireless energy of a hyperactive, over-inquiring kid,” wrote the great Frank Keating, reporting on the Test at Headingley for these pages in 1994. “One sliding stop, which had him exploding into the midwicket boundary boards as if he had come flying straight off a TT motorcycle.”

Even now he remains synonymous with fiendish fielding, a player who changed what it meant to patrol backward point and gained run-outs by reputation. This might have been the first of them, a fact that alone could have earned it a place on this list. It is the jaw-dropping execution, though, that doesn’t just linger in the memory but has its own framed place on the wall.

Jonty Rhodes runs out Inzy

Pakistan were chasing a rain-revised 194 in 36 overs and had reached 135 for two, needing another 59 runs from 35 deliveries. Inzamam swung and missed at a Brian McMillan delivery. The ball looped up off the pad and spun towards Rhodes. Inzamam set off. Imran Khan, at the non-striker’s end, perhaps after taking a glance at the swooping blond bowl cut, perhaps simply spotting that any run from the shot would have been an unnecessarily risky one had C3PO been stiff-legging it in from backward point, sent his batting partner back.

As HMS Inzamam put the brakes on mid-pitch and turned back, Rhodes gathered and flung, not the ball, but himself at the stumps. The zoom lenses captured an iconic image. Steve Bucknor raised the finger from square leg. A fielding phenomenon was born. JA

When Ed Joyce was caught, accidentally, by Jonathan Trott in 2009 – the fielder, at short leg, had turned his back on the ball in self-defence as Joyce connected with a sweep, which sent the ball directly into Trott’s trouser pocket – the cricket-watching world delighted in a once-in-a-lifetime sporting fluke. The search for a precedent in first-class English cricket quickly went back more than half a century to 1946, when Surrey’s Alf Gover, after completing an over, took his jumper from the umpire and donned it as Jim Laker started the next. And so he was facing away from the wicket, with his jumper around his head, when Hampshire’s Rodney Exton swept a shot in his direction, and knew nothing of it until the ball flew, and stuck, between his thighs.

But Joyce, it turned out, was a magnet of improbability, a man around whom the incalculably unlikely happens on a regular basis. “It has happened to me three times before when the ball got caught in a piece of the fielder’s clothing but never straight in the pocket,” he said. “Trott didn’t even know it was there. He looked around before realising it was in his pocket.

Jonathan Trott catches Ed Joyce. In his pocket. Photograph: Michael Regan/Getty Images Photograph: Michael Regan/Getty Images

“It was unbelievable,” he said at the time. “I must have done something really terrible to get that sort of bad luck. I have been caught in the folds of a fielder’s shirt before, and once I hit someone in the chest and the ball trickled down and ended up being caught between his legs – but that was definitely the neatest – straight in his pocket.”

It is impossible to calculate the dizzying odds against the ball being struck into someone’s chest and then settling, somehow, between the same player’s thighs – frankly it barely seems physically possible – but Joyce’s record certainly puts a new spin on the phrase “luck of the Irish”. SB

4) David Boon catches Devon Malcolm at short leg (Australia v England, 1994)

Of all the achievements in Test cricket, contributing to the dismissal of Devon Malcolm is among the least impressive (the English bowler’s average with the bat in 58 innings, a third of them unbeaten, was 6.05). But Boon’s catch to dismiss the hapless tailender at Melbourne in 1994 was memorable for a couple of reasons: first, it completed the first of two Test hat-tricks that Shane Warne was involved in (the other was as the last victim of Harbhajan Singh in Calcutta six and a half years later), and secondly that he looked entertainingly like he had come straight from an audition for the role of Gimli in the Lord of the Rings.

Hirsute little men have shamingly few role models at the pinnacle of professional sport, but in this regard David Boon stands like a very much figurative colossus. He might not have looked much like an athlete, but he had the reflexes of a viper and the bravery of a lion, standing with the very minimum of protection at short-wherever-he-was-told as batsmen took turns to thump hard objects in his direction, and very often teaching them never to try it again.

He retired with 99 Test catches to his credit, with this – and a similar effort to dismiss Hanse Cronje, also off Warne’s bowling, on the same ground the previous year – as fine as any examples you could find of the close catcher’s art. Speaking to Sky recently on life at short leg, Boon said: “The real key is that you’ve got to want to be there. There’s no point coming here if you’re going to be scared.” Short leg may be an acceptable place to stand briefly and occasionally, but it takes a particular kind of stubborn, beautiful man-walrus to make a career of it. SB

The goal for your team that should never have been given. Someone else’s chips. An extra half hour in bed. That third pint on a midweek evening. Sometimes the thrill of naughtiness can make things all the more satisfying. An England substitute running out the Australia captain – one who had complained about England’s use of substitutes – at a vital point in a pivotal Ashes Test? The English cricket fan would struggle to get a better naughty thrill without the addition of chocolate and a riding crop.

“He taught us the pain and misery of defeat, but he also taught us how sweet victory can taste when a hard bastard on the other side has done the losing,” wrote the Times’s Simon Barnes of Ricky Ponting. ‘Punter’ was not a pantomime villain – in the same way that the Terminator was not a pantomime villain – but he was the Australian England fans loved to hate (and eventually, by extension, simply to love). He had begun raging about England’s use of substitute fielders before the Ashes series had even started, and here he was trudging back to the pavilion, thanks to the gun arm of Gary Pratt, a youngster who had yet to make a first-class appearance for Durham, as the Trent Bridge cavorted around him.

Gary Pratt is mobbed by England team-mates. Photograph: Tom Jenkins Photograph: Tom Jenkins/Guardian

It was too much. He exploded. First at Aleem Dar. Then at Matthew Hoggard and Ashley Giles. Then finally at a smiling Duncan Fletcher on the England balcony. The thing was, he had a point – England were not just stretching the spirit of the game, they had it on the rack. But he had chosen the wrong moment to lose the plot. Pratt was on the field for Simon Jones, who was in hospital having an x-ray on his ankle, an injury that, it turned out, meant he never played for England again. Ponting was not to know that at the time, but his meltdown came to symbolise Australia’s fragility. “I did not actually think it at the time,” wrote Fletcher in his book on the series, “but, looking back now, that might have been the moment when it became clear England were going to reclaim the Ashes.” JA

In these Twenty20-infused times there had to be one of these – the spectacular diving boundary catch. It pretty much comes down to personal choice. You might be a fan of Adam Voges’s one-man variety show for Australia against New Zealand.

Or maybe you prefer Chris Lynn’s slip/recovery/contortion catch in the IPL.

My choice, though, is Michael Mason’s joint diving effort with Central Districts 12th man Bevan Small to remove Brad Wilson of Northern Districts. Relay throws are probably a bit over-rated. Not this one.

That said, this Joy of Six might not really be one for Small, if his interview with the New Zealand Herald a week later is any indicator. “It’s only a piece of fielding,” he Buzz Killingtoned. JA