Glenn Phillips remembers the catches he had spilled more than the ones he had pouched. “Sometimes you remember the ones that you drop a little bit more than the great ones,” he tells The Indian Express. He dusts up memories of the worst catch he had dropped. “There was one in the Caribbean League when I was younger. It was a pretty dolly catch out on the boundary. I got my hands up, it slid straight through,” he says, with a chuckle.
Self-deprecatory jokes apart, he dwells on his three favourites. He rattles out the instances rather than being in a dilemma to pick from his album of spectacular catches. There are all sorts: gravity-defying, bone-bending, fence-trimmers, diving backwards, sideways, forward. He is a one-man catching manual, arguably the greatest when factoring in his mastery of fielding and catching in different ones.
“The one that I keep close to my heart? The Marcus Stoinis one in the T20 World Cup in Australia.” Stoinis lofted left-arm spinner Mitchell Santner over cover. The shot was not lusty enough to clear the fence, but it seemed to be falling in no man’s land when Phillips sprinted from deep cover and flung himself fully in the air, suspending like an aeroplane, and swooped it. “Well, I remember just the moments,” he says.
The two others are a couple of snaffles in Test cricket at the Hagley Oval in 2024. First was Marnus Labuschagne, who glided a wide-ish ball towards third man. Phillips hurled from gully, full stretch and grabbed it one-handed. The next catch was similar, but he was fielding at backward point. Ollie Pope’s cut was full-blooded. But Phillips leapt and stuck his right hand out, like a telescope “Big dives to the right side,” is all that he remembers.