Herschelle Gibbs Dropped Catch In World Cup 1999: Why Is Ben Stokes Being Compared To Gibbs?

Former South African batter Herschelle Gibbs‘ mobile phone would have surely been flooded with innumerable notifications by now. Reason for the same is a silly drop catch by England captain Ben Stokes at the stroke of Lunch, Day 5, of the ongoing fifth Ashes 2023 Test at The Oval.

One of the best fielders during his playing days, Gibbs had made a mess of a more or less similar catching opportunity during an ICC Cricket World Cup 1999 match against Australia. The consequence of the drop would later not only haunt him, but the entire South African team on the day of the semi-final match between these two very sides.

Post his dropped catch off the then Australian captain Steve Waugh, a rather fake news had spread like wildfire claiming that Waugh had quipped to Gibbs – “How does it feel to drop the World Cup, Herschelle?”. Later, both Gibbs and Waugh would deny having any such conversation at the time.

Herschelle Gibbs Dropped Catch

Chasing a 272-run target in a Super Sixes clash at Headingley, Australia had the match proceedings pretty much under their control with the scorecard reading 149/3 at the end of 30th over.

In the following over, Waugh whipped a Lance Klusener delivery off his pads towards Gibbs, who was stationed at mid-wicket. A relatively simple catch indeed, Gibbs had the ball placed clean into his hands. However, in a bid to celebrate right away by throwing the ball up in the air, the ball slipped out of his hands resulting in the catch being incomplete.

Batting at the score of 56* at the time of a reprieve, Waugh went on to score a match-winning century (120*). Not only is Gibbs continuously reminded of the costly miss on the field that day till date, but what’s more unfortunate is that the mistake had completely overshadowed the fact that it was due to his century (101) that South Africa were able to score 271/7 in 50 overs.

While South Africa had already booked their place in the semi-final, their loss had made sure that Australia had toppled Zimbabwe in the points table and booked their place as well in the final four.

Coincidentally, three days later, these two teams would face each other in the semi-final clash as well. In what turned out to be an edge-of-the-seat thriller at Edgbaston that day, the match had ended in a tie.

By virtue of defeating the Proteas in the aforementioned Super Sixes fixture, Australia booked a World Cup final spot only to be ultimately crowned the world champions by defeating Pakistan at Lord’s.

Herschelle Gibbs Reacts To Ben Stokes’ Dropped Catch In The Ashes 2023

Quite active across social media platforms, Gibbs did react to one of the notifications on his phone. Readers must note that he commented under England Cricket’s official Instagram handle as they had posted a slow motion video of the incident where Stokes dropped the catch in the excitement of a celebration.

“Seen this somewhere before,” the 49-year-old hilariously commented to follow it up with a couple of laughing emojis.

It remains to be seen whether or not akin Gibbs, even Stokes has cost England a loss in the Ashes 2023 series or not.