Nothing in cricket erupts into a fuller roar than a fielder somersaulting over the rope, palming the ball back in-play, and then—sometimes in the same acrobatic breath—diving in again to complete the catch. These are the “six-saving” outfielders: players whose athleticism not only denies the batter six runs but also redraws the mental map of what is humanly possible on the boundary.
For coaches, analysts and fans, the problem is that television flattens the moment. You might clutch your head in disbelief, but two-dimensional replay rarely conveys the knife-edge geometry—trajectory, hang-time, leap angle—that separates a televised miracle from an almost-made-it blooper.
That is why we built a browser-native WebGL visualisation of six of the greatest boundary catches of the last decade. By stitching Hawk-Eye coordinate feeds and photogrammetry into a Three.js pipeline, we can spin, zoom and pause each play in true 3-D, letting anyone with Chrome or Safari orbit around the action from any angle.
Below we present the stories behind the six catches, the physics that underpins them, and a peek behind the curtain at how the WebGL model lets you relive them down to the centimetre.
1. Trent Boult vs. West Indies, Manchester 2019
Boult is a bowler by trade, but in the 16th over of a tense World Cup group match he turned stuntman. Shimron Hetmyer launched Mitchell Santner high and flat toward long-on. Boult back-pedalled, timed a reverse-step jump, and caught the ball almost behind his own head. Realising his momentum would drag him across the rope, he pogo-pushed the ball skyward mid-air, landed beyond the boundary sponge, re-established his balance, and hopped back in to pouch the rebound.
3-D Insight: In the WebGL model you can freeze-frame the first release at 3.2 m above ground—the ball was actually descending at only 1.1 m s⁻¹, barely above stall speed, meaning Boult’s hang-time rather than horizontal reach proved decisive.
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2. Chris Lynn vs. Royal Challengers Bangalore, Abu Dhabi 2014
Long before T20 franchises floated million-dollar contracts, Lynn scented one in the desert. AB de Villiers flat-hooked a lifter toward deep mid-wicket. Lynn slipped, recovered, sprang backwards full Superman, and clamped the catch while parallel to the turf. His head crossed the rope but his boots did not.
Physics Note: The model shows a launch angle of –18° relative to the horizontal—yes, a negative take-off caused by the initial slip—which meant Lynn converted what should have been a skid into an unorthodox dive trajectory. His centre of gravity stayed 14 cm inside the rope. Without the stumble, he might have over-run the flight-path entirely.
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3. Harleen Deol vs. England Women, Northampton 2021
Boundary brilliance is not a men-only domain. Harleen Deol’s cocktail-spinning pirouette remains perhaps the most watched women’s cricket clip on social media. Running in from long-off, she flung herself forward, clasped the ball inches above grass, but inertia hurdled her towards the advertising boards. Mid-somersault she lobbed the ball up, cartwheeled over the rope, flipped back in and dived to reclaim it.
Biomechanics: Deol’s inside-foot push generated a lateral impulse of 2.8 m s⁻¹, while her airborne tuck-position trimmed her moment of inertia, letting her complete 240° of body rotation in 0.55 s—numbers you can measure directly in our Three.js timeline scrubber.
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4. Kieron Pollard vs. Australia, Gros Islet 2021
Pollard is six-foot-five and built like an oak door, yet he moves as though that door is mounted on ball bearings. In a bilateral T20, Australia’s Dan Christian pummelled Obed McCoy over long-on. Pollard leapt, right arm extended 2.47 m above the turf, palmed the ball vertically, performed a mid-air U-turn, landed outside, then hopped in to finish.
Our WebGL shader assigns a translucent ribbon to the ball’s z-axis altitude: at maximum arc Pollard’s fingers were 8 cm higher than the ball’s centroid. Put differently, the catch succeeded only because his wrist hyper-extended an extra four degrees at the apex—tiny motions you cannot spot in broadcast footage.
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5. Ravindra Jadeja vs. New Zealand, Auckland 2020
Jadeja’s USP is ground coverage, but this catch displayed chessboard awareness. Ross Taylor aimed a slog-sweep towards a short Eden Park boundary. Jadeja sprinted from cow-corner on a diagonal vector, reached the drop zone, jumped blind-side to the rope, and snared a reverse-cup catch at shoulder height. No relay needed; pure anticipation.
Spatial Analytics: Because the stadium’s roof overhang distorts GPS, we corrected Jadeja’s sprint vector using crowd-sourced smartphone footage matched via structure-from-motion. The 3-D heatmap shows his route bending 17° mid-dash, a micro-adjustment made when the ball was still 25 m above him.
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6. Glenn Phillips vs. West Indies, Mount Maunganui 2020
Phillips is the parkour practitioner of the Black Caps. Nicholas Pooran’s missile looked six from the moment it left the bat. Phillips sprinted, vaulted, and in a single motion volleyed the ball back mid-air to fielder Mitchell Santner, who swallowed the relay. Technically Phillips does not appear in the scorebook as the catcher, but without his volleyball set there was no wicket.
Collaboration Visualised: Our model runs a dual-object constraint so that once Phillips contacts the ball, its velocity vector inherits his body-frame coordinates. Toggle “link bodies” in the UI and you’ll watch Santner’s re-entry path auto-generate the hand-off, teaching young cricketers how team geometry wins margins.
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How We Built the WebGL Model
- Data Capture – We obtained Hawk-Eye XYZ coordinates for ball + players at 50 fps. Where Hawk-Eye was unavailable (e.g., Harleen Deol), we imported broadcast frame-sequences into OpenPose for skeletal tracking and triangulated with crowd videos.
- Geometry & Textures – Player meshes were low-poly silhouettes extruded from depth maps, then wrapped in KitBash-style jersey textures. Stadiums came from publicly released IFC building models to keep polycount browser-friendly.
- Physics Engine – The ball follows a verlet-integrated parabola with aerodynamic drag constant c_d = 0.47. User toggles can exaggerate drag to see “what-if” trajectories had the shot carried 5 m further.
- Interface – We chose Three.js for WebGL rendering, dat.GUI for layer toggles, and GSAP for scrub-bar timelines. Even mid-range smartphones sustain 40 fps. A service worker caches shader chunks for offline replay—fielding drills on the bus, anyone?
Why 3-D Matters for Coaching
- Reaction Windows: Freeze the model the instant the batter makes contact. Coaches can measure how many tenths of a second a fielder had to react and tune practice drills accordingly.
- Optimal Run-Lines: By toggling “projected path,” the app draws the straight-line sprint versus the actual curved route, quantifying wasted metres.
- Team Relays: The Phillips-Santner play shows that boundary saves are sometimes cooperative puzzles. Visualising both trajectories simultaneously teaches spatial awareness that plain video can’t.
- Fan Engagement & SEO: Embedding shareable WebGL snippets increases time-on-page—a Google ranking metric—thanks to WebGL’s low-latency interaction hook.