85: Mark Boucher

147 Tests. 5,515 runs @ 30.30. 5 hundreds. 532 catches. 23 stumpings.

16 years. 1x outstanding.

The discussion

Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the first head-to-head matchup in our Hall of Fame.

Over the course of my deliberations, I found it very difficult to split Mark Boucher and Ian Healy. They felt so evenly matched that I decided the only way to separate them was to pit them against each other. Thus, 'The Decider’ was born.

The rules are simple:

1.      This is a five-round battle, to be graded similarly to a boxing match.

2.      Each round is to be scored 10-9 or 10-8. There can be no draw. Get off the fence and make a decision.

3.      Keep it impersonal. Ian Healy may have been a childhood hero of my wicketkeeping younger brother, and also one or more members of the podcast, but put that sentiment aside (as much as possible).

4.      The winner is the player who has the higher score at the end of the five rounds, which will earn them the higher place in the Hall of Fame rankings.

5.      The judge’s decision is final, until I come under immense pressure from the panel or our listeners and readers to alter it in the years to come.

Now that we’ve got the admin out of the way, let’s begin!

Round one — wicketkeeping to pace bowlers

Wicketkeeping to pace and spin are very different prospects. It is possible to be good at one facet and not the other. Excelling at both is often what separates the good keepers from the great ones. In certain conditions, England in particular, keeping to both swing and seam bowling can be every bit as mentally and physically taxing as standing up to the stumps for long periods of time. For Ian Healy and Mark Boucher, their native conditions, with generally even pace and bounce, provided almost the ideal environment to hone their craft. Of course, it helps when you keep wicket to a bowler like Glenn McGrath or Allan Donald; you know you are going to get plenty of chances at a catchable height.

Looking at the total dismissals, Boucher has a clear edge with 532 Test catches (not all of them against pace, of course). This is significantly more than Ian Healy’s 366 catches (again, not all standing back).

But the statistics do not tell the whole story. In fact, I give Ian Healy the edge against the quicks because his wicketkeeping always felt more artful than his contemporaries. Healy elevated the movement — the take on the inside hip, even the rolling dive — into something more akin to art, rather than a chore to be performed with the minimum of movement or physical effort. Mark Boucher possessed a similar technique to Healy, but his qualities just felt a little emulated. A good facsimile, but not the original artwork from the original artist.

Score: Healy 10 — Boucher 9

Round two — wicketkeeping to spin bowlers

I could not find statistics that tallied the number of catches taken from spin bowlers for each of our contestants. I do not have a breakdown of stumpings to fast bowlers, either, but I am assuming that this number is negligible. I also do not read too much into the number of stumpings to spinners as a mark for a wicketkeeper’s prowess. You can only convert the opportunities afforded to you by the bowler. And without meaning any disrespect to Paul Harris, Nicky Boje, Paul Adams, et al, their 400-odd wickets during Mark Boucher’s career are significantly fewer than the 600 wickets between Shane Warne, Tim May and Stuart MacGill over Ian Healy’s career.

Acknowledging once again the challenges of judging a wicketkeeper by the statistics, we will revert again to the eye test. Here I rely solely on memory, and the feel of having watched someone play. I was lucky enough to see a lot of Ian Healy’s career when I was a child, and Mark Boucher as I grew through my teenage years into young adulthood, and I always felt that Ian Healy was a much stronger wicketkeeper to spin than Boucher. In fact, of all the wicketkeepers I have seen live or on television, I have not seen a keeper glove the ball as cleanly against spinners as Healy did. His footwork (more important than you might think), and the position of his head, hips and hands was and still is the gold standard for all wicketkeepers. To the prodigious spin of Warne and MacGill, and to the bounce of Tim May, Ian Healy was near perfect. Mark Boucher was also tidy up to the stumps, but he was not in Healy’s class. Expanding on that last point a little, no one I have seen is in the same class as Ian Healy keeping to spin bowlers.

Score: Healy 10 — Boucher 8

Round three — batting

Boucher and Healy played in an era where the role of the wicketkeeper pivoted from wicketkeeper to wicketkeeper/batter. In fact, Healy and Boucher might just about be the last great ‘pure’ wicketkeepers, picked as glovemen first and on batting ability second.

Fortunately for this analysis, batting has many more statistics than wicketkeeping:

Boucher has the edge in pretty much every category here. The edges are not dramatic, but the South African wins each category. I could wax lyrical and elaborate here extensively, but the story is clear. Boucher takes this round.

Score: Boucher 10 — Healy 9

Round four — longevity

The impartial part of me really wanted Healy to win this round. Of course, Ian Healy set the standard by breaking the world record for dismissals for a wicketkeeper. But the numbers aren’t in his favour:

Boucher comes out on top, both in total dismissals and dismissals per innings. After focusing on the more subjective, or ‘pure’ wicketkeeping standards in rounds one and two, it was important to let the numbers do the talking here.

The dismissals per innings was a surprise, I fully expected Healy to edge Boucher based on the fact that the Warne/McGrath combination provided so many chances, but Boucher’s lead was relatively comfortable in the end.

And going back to that world record that Healy set, well, as you can see, Mark Boucher went past it and put some distance between the two totals. I feel that record is in pretty safe hands (see what I did there) for at least a few years to come.

Score: Boucher 10 — Healy 9

Round five — gamesmanship

Mark Boucher was not short of a word or two to the batter to let them know how they were performing, how close lunch was or how little the bowler at the other end thought of the batter’s prowess. Boucher’s peak gamesmanship highlight (or lowlight, depending on your point of view) came at the expense of an early Top Order Podcast guest, Zimbabwean wicketkeeper Tatenda Taibu. Taibu had feasted in a previous series where some injuries to the South African team left them short of depth in the bowling department but, this time around, Taibu was struggling and Boucher wasn’t shy about reminding Tatenda. Over several interludes, Boucher constantly referred to Taibu’s average, hovering between 9, 9.5 and eventually ‘I’ll give you ten’.

But Ian Healy comes into his own in the gamesmanship round. Even before stump mics recorded and transmitted to our living rooms every piece of ‘banter’, you could tell that Ian Healy was bringing his A-game to every innings. Every Test batter from 1988 until his retirement in 1999 knew exactly what Healy thought of their batting ability, and where they could go if they felt like an early shower, or fancied tucking into a meal. The apocryphal tales abound; from Mars bars on a good length, to the right to a runner. His banter was legendary, perhaps too good.

Score: Healy 10 — Boucher 9

The verdict

Other wicketkeepers might appear higher on the list in these Hall of Fame rankings. Rest assured that they do so more for their batting prowess than their glovework. For me, these two represent the pinnacle of the most mentally taxing of positions in a cricket team. 

Despite the statistics being in favour of Mark Boucher, the eye test is more important here. Wicketkeeping is more art than science, more so than any other discipline. If they were sculptors, Boucher might be Rodin. Healy, Michelangelo[1]. Both significant, both famous. In my eyes, one is clearly a better artist than the other, but like all art, this is entirely subjective. I might not be a wicketkeeper, but I feel like I know ‘good art’ when I see it. And it’s Healy every time in this discussion.

In the end, the verdict was more clear-cut than I had imagined it might be when I started the process. Ian Healy is the clear winner in the battle for the title of the best pure wicketkeeper — at least according to my subjective assessment.

Score: Healy 48 — Boucher 46

In one word

Abrasive

Notes

[1] This analogy breaks down a fraction when you consider how truly prodigious Michelangelo was throughout his life. Michelangelo almost certainly wins the numbers game, too. Not all analogies are perfect.

Bio

Record

Source: ESPN CricInfo

career peak

Sources: ESPN CricInfo, ESPN CricInfo