Follow UsFormer Australia captain Bob Simpson passed away on August 15 (Friday) at the age of 89. Simpson played 62 Tests for his country between 1957 and 1978, scoring nearly 5,000 runs and also picking up 71 wickets.
Well after his retirement, Simpson spent some time with the Indian cricket team in 1998-99, where Rahul Dravid, one of India's finest batters, spent time with the Australian to learn about how to contribute more as a player. One of those was to become a better slip fielder.
“I wasn’t a good enough bowler to be able to contribute with the ball. I tried my best. So I sort of figured out ‘How do you contribute to the team? What do you do?’. I mean, sitting there as a batsman, what can I do really well, and one of the things was, if I catch well, it’s a contribution. You feel you’re involved, you’re playing a part," Dravid said, according to OneCricket.
“I remember Bobby Simpson came and spent some time with the Indian team in 1998/99, and he took us through a lot of slip catching drills. And one of the things he stressed on a lot was having your feet bent a little bit so that you could get your weight into the balls of your feet. That was something I took to heart and practised a lot.”
Dravid was the most successful outfield catcher with 210 scalps, before he was recently surpassed by Joe Root. Dravid also admitted to watching Mark Taylor and Mark Waugh, who were outstanding catchers at slip.
“Even watching someone like Mark Waugh, the way he stood, in some ways, I used to watch that. It was a really good Australian slip-catching unit: you had [Mark] Taylor, Waugh, they were really, really good, and you used to sort of watch them," he said.
Along with being a great slip fielder, Dravid is also second only to Sachin Tendulkar in terms of runs scored for India in Tests. He amassed 13,288 runs in 164 Tests at an average of 52.31.