'You just dropped the World Cup'

When you Google ‘Herschelle Gibbs’, the first autocomplete option suggested by the search engine is ‘Herschelle Gibbs drop’.

So infamous is his spill off Australia skipper Steve Waugh in the 1999 Cricket World Cup, the incident is now inked to his name like the myriad tattoos on his body.

But the missed chance that left the Headingley crowd shocked did not come as a surprise to Waugh, who had been advised in a team meeting that Gibbs was prone to fumble in his overzealous celebration.

Swing bowler Damien Fleming was watching on from the dressing room and recounts how one of the sharpest minds in cricket predicted the moment that changed the World Cup.

"Talking in a team meeting the night before, we were going through their players," Fleming recalls. 

"Warnie put his hand up and goes, ‘I just want to say something. I reckon Herschelle Gibbs and Jonty Rhodes don’t catch the ball - they don’t control it and they throw it up too quickly. I reckon we should stand our ground and question whether they control the ball'."

"So Tugga told us it wasn’t a team rule but if an individual wanted to question it, why not?

"It didn’t totally happen the way Warnie described it, but how perceptive of him to pick that up just from previous games."

Gibbs' blunder, about which the late Tony Greig bellowed on air, ‘I don’t believe it, that’s unbelievable’, was followed by the most quoted misquote in cricket’s rich history.

As the umpire handed the unfortunate bowler Lance Klusener his cap to signal the end of the 31st over, Waugh was within range of the deflated Gibbs to allegedly fire his 'How does it feel to have just dropped the World Cup?' salvo.

Since then, 'Tugga' has corrected the myth, informing the cricketing world that the line was something closer to: 'That's going to cost your team today, Hersch'.

"I know Steve Waugh disowns that comment now but the general feel at the time was that he’d said it," Fleming added.

"And it’s certainly something Tugga would say to an opposition player who basically stuffed up trying to be a bit of a lair."