Legends Month: The best of Mark Waugh

Mark Waugh, one of the greatest slips fielders the game has known, is living proof of one cricketing cliche and a contradiction of another.

'Catches win matches', as the saying goes, and Waugh caught more catches and won more matches than most; 181 dismissals in Tests (he held the world record between 2001 and 2009) and 108 more in one-day internationals in a 14-year career that yielded 224 victories for his country.

But Waugh didn't necessarily always believe that 'practice makes perfect', at least when it came to catching.

"You don't have to practise too much," Waugh said after breaking Mark Taylor's Test record on the 2001 Ashes tour.

"You've just got to keep your eye in. I don't practise a lot because you get sore hands."

And he also maintained that some players are simply born to excel in the field.

"I don't think coaching can teach you that much," he said. "Most good slip fielders are pretty natural."

And no one was more natural than Mark Edward Waugh.

His catching philosophy – "don't try and catch the ball, let the ball catch you" – was first developed in the backyard of his family's humble home in Sydney's south-west, an unlikely breeding ground for two of Australia's greatest ever cricketers.

It was here that Rodger Waugh would spend hours hitting catches at his twin boys, Mark and Stephen, with a tennis racquet and ball in an effort to teach them the value of soft hands. Catching a hard cricket ball with hard hands is inadvisable; trying it with a tennis ball is near impossible.

Both brothers turned into exceptional fielders and brilliant cricketers, but there was no doubt that Mark was always easier on the eye.

And it was the seemingly nonchalant ease with which he would launch his body sideways, and use those famously soft hands to reel in balls that mere mortals would consider to be out of reach, that made him one of the most eye-catching cricketers of his generation.

Even 15 years since his retirement, in the T20 era where athletic fielding is expected rather than simply being applauded, Waugh's name is a constant on the 'greatest catches of all time' lists.

His dismissal of Inzamam-ul-Haq in Hobart in 1999, when he backed away at first slip to spinner Shane Warne and flung his right arm sideways and backwards to latch onto a firmly-struck cut shot, is one of his best.

He rates his catch to remove Alec Stewart at Headingley in 1993 as a personal favourite; another powerful cut that, with Waugh standing back at second slip to paceman Paul Reiffel, he grabbed in his right hand while his body was almost parallel to the ground.

And he delivered a similar grab on the biggest stage, the 1999 World Cup final at Lord’s, when a prod from Pakistan's Wajahatullah Wasti flew high and wide to Waugh's right before he somehow clasped both hands around the ball and photographer Adrian Murrell snapped an iconic image of that campaign.

All spectacular catches that, as the saying goes, helped win matches.