Ollie Robinson’s wicket celebration is becoming very familiar

2 minute read

Ollie Robinson doesn’t do his pointing upper-cut celebration every time he takes a wicket, but he does it often enough that it certainly feels like he does.

Plenty of bowlers have had signature celebrations over the years – little sequences of actions they reflexively do in response to each dismissal. A lot of the time it feels like the same piece of footage played again and again, but the better ones vary within a recognisable framework. Dale Steyn’s chainsaw-starting/mole-punching move had huge emotional range, for example. One day he’d do it furiously; the next day he’d do it so furiously you’d worry his boiling blood was going to burst through his skin.

Ollie Robinson’s move is sneakily adaptable. You tend to think he always does it the same, but he doesn’t.

The basic shape of it is he jumps side-on and then delivers an upper-cut with index finger extended. When he arrived on the Test scene back when there were no crowds, it was immediately obvious that this swinging point was also punctuated by a loud, percussive “woo!”

It’s honestly not much different to his bowling action, only underarm.

But while those are the nuts and bolts of it, it seems there’s plenty of scope to mix things up a bit.

Sometimes it’s a relaxed point that calmly expresses relief. Sometimes it’s almost apologetic with the upper-cut delivered right near the torso so you’d have to be viewing from the right angle to even know it had happened.

Other times it’s full-blooded.

It can be hard to gauge eyelines on TV coverage, but it often seems to be preceded by a good eyeballing of the dismissed batter.

This week we learned that the eyeballing can sometimes come afterwards too, alongside a facial expression that seems to be equal parts Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Michael Ironside in Scanners and Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

There aren’t too many areas of life where you’d feel in any way comfortable being on the receiving end of that.

Memorable stuff. However Mohammad Nabi’s celebration v Pakistan in the 2019 World Cup remains our all-time favourite wicket celebration.

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