Picture the scene. You are at the top of your bowling mark with the sun on your shoulders. A light breeze at your back. Reverse-swinging ball in your hand. You are playing in your third Test match and have just taken two wickets in two balls. It’s the first over of the day and some of the Old Trafford crowd are still milling about trying to find their seats. The tardy and hungover quicken their pace at the tram platform when they hear two throaty roars in quick succession.

You have a chance of taking a Test hat-trick. You take a deep breath at the top of your mark. Steady yourself. No one says anything to you, no last-minute words of advice or encouragement. Your teammates leave you to it.

You focus entirely on making it count. Getting it full. Your eyes home in on Carl Hooper’s front pad. That’s the target. The crowd begin to roar in a way you’ve never experienced before and won’t again. This is it. This is your moment. Do not mess it up.

There have been 49 Test hat-tricks: 46 by men and three by women. Think of all those balls lobbed up and whanged down through the decades, from the flannelled and moustachioed amateurs of the Victorian era all the way to the gym-honed and data-drenched professionals of today. On fewer than 50 occasions has a player emulated in Test cricket the “trick” Heathfield Harman Stephenson managed to pull off at Hyde Park cricket ground in Sheffield in 1858.

“HH” was a notable round-arm seam bowler for Surrey and was playing for an All-England XI against the local side Hallam when he took three wickets in consecutive balls. Legend has it the crowd were so moved by his exploits that they spontaneously held a whip round and put their collective contributions in a stovepipe hat. This was presented to him at the end of the innings. The term hat-trick was born and is ubiquitous around the world, in countless sports, more than a century and a half later.

HH Stephenson didn’t fluff his lines when he took two in two in 1858. Nor did Dominic Cork in 1995. Though he had before. “I’d been on a hat-trick and messed it up,” Cork says. A few years previously, the Derbyshire seamer removed Worcestershire’s Tim Curtis and Graeme Hick with consecutive balls. In strolled his hero – Ian Botham.

“I wanted to show him what I was about, so I bounced him,” says Cork, with a rueful chuckle. After the match Botham sought the young seamer out to give him some advice. “He said: ‘Don’t ever do that again. If you ever get in the position to take a hat-trick, you go full and straight at the stumps.’”

Advice from Botham nowadays may need to be consumed with an entire Bolivian salt flat, but when it comes to being on a hat-trick the Beefy one’s instructions are worth heeding.

How often does it seem like a bowler takes two in two? Chances are you have been in the ground or watching on TV when there’s been an opportunity for two to become three?

You may recognise the sweaty-palmed prayer of anticipation the chance of a hat-trick produces? That first date-rivalling frisson? The fleeting expectation that something of cricket’s ethereal intangibility is about to be harnessed? All of this adds to the hat-trick’s allure. Oh, the bowler has slammed it down the leg side. Shame. Next time, perhaps.

Forty-nine hat-tricks in Test history then, but it feels like there’s a chance of one in every other series. The data is tricky to dig into. Pre-2000 ball-by-ball data isn’t complete enough to really excavate the mysterious truth about Test hat-tricks, but since the turn of the century there have been 756 occasions when a bowler has taken two wickets in two balls in men’s Test cricket. On 20 of these occasions they have been converted into three in three. So, 736 times the chance has gone begging.

Who has spurned the most chances? Again, since 2000, Murali and Mitchell Starc have failed to convert 14 hat-trick opportunities, but can take comfort (ahem) in having been the final wicket in an opponent’s Test hat‑trick (Mohammad Sami and Rangana Herath say thanks). Vernon Philander found himself on the precipice 13 times but never converted, Jimmy Anderson and Dale Steyn a dozen times each. Morne Morkel also skirted round the brim of a hat-trick on 12 occasions without succeeding, though he was the final scalp of Moeen Ali’s hat-trick in 2017, the first in Test cricket at the Oval.

Anomalies themselves, hat-tricks seem to throw up these sorts of glitches in the cricketing universe. In 1994, Cork found himself on a hat-trick against Kent. “Guess who my third victim was? Carl Hooper.”

Cork pinned Hooper lbw at Derby and didn’t miss his moment during the Old Trafford Test a year later; the ball reverse-swinging into Hooper’s front pad and the umpire Cyril Mitchley raising his finger before Cork had managed to turn around. He became the first Englishman to take a Test hat-trick in 38 years.

“Mine is something I’m very proud of. The ball is on the wall at my mum’s house just as you come through the door, above a picture of me when I was 12. ‘The shrine’ my brothers call it.” He pauses and then adds “Hat-tricks, you know, they are magical things.”

Somewhere out there, yet to be captured, is Test cricket’s 50th hat-trick. When the chance comes, don’t miss it.

This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.