12 years on from Waugh's famous words to Gibbs

In the Guardian, Andy Bull looks back at one of the more well-known sentences in world cricket: “You’ve just dropped the World Cup”. Both Steve Waugh and Herschelle Gibbs have since said those weren’t Waugh’s exact words, and Bull attempts to uncover how and why the myth took flight.

It is easy to imagine how he allowed the press to run with the idea that he told Gibbs that the catch had cost his team the World Cup. "I liked the quote," he said later, "I think it is quite funny." It added to his aura, suggesting that he had such granite-willed self-belief in his own ability that he could predict Australia's eventual victory even though they weren't even in the semi-finals yet. And, of course, it suggested that he had a certain mastery over South Africa in particular, that contests between the two would, inevitably, be bent to his will.