Adam Gilchrist redefined the wicketkeeper-batter
Before Adam Gilchrist, a Test wicketkeeper who could also bat well was a bonus. After him, sides went looking for one who could do both at once. He batted at seven with the strike rate of an opener and, in his second Test, won a match Australia had no business winning.
Understudy in waiting
Adam Gilchrist grew up in New South Wales before moving to Western Australia in search of a settled place in a state side, and he spent years as Ian Healy's deputy in the Australian squad, playing one-day internationals from 1996 while waiting for a Test opening that did not come until Healy retired in late 1999. He was nearly 28 by the time he made his Test debut, against Pakistan at the Gabba in November 1999, scoring 81 in his only innings of a match Australia won. It was an assured start, but nothing about it prepared observers for what followed in his very next Test.
The long wait behind Healy meant Gilchrist arrived in the Test side as a fully formed one-day player already, comfortable playing shots most Test batters of the era treated as unnecessary risks. Where Healy had been picked chiefly for his gloves, with runs a bonus, the selectors backing Gilchrist knew they were getting a specialist batter who also happened to keep wicket, and the balance of that trade-off shaped the way Australia built its middle order for most of the next decade.
The Hobart chase
In the second Test of that same series, at Bellerive Oval in Hobart, Australia were set 369 to win on the last day, a target that looked well out of reach after early wickets fell. Gilchrist came in and, batting with Justin Langer, played one of the great chase-defining innings in Test history: 149 not out from 163 balls, and Australia won with wickets in hand. It remains among his five best innings in the CricArcade archive, and it announced, in only his second Test, that Australia now had a wicketkeeper capable of winning a match from a position that had looked lost.
The fastest double hundred
The highest score of Gilchrist's career came at the Wanderers in Johannesburg in 2002, where he made 204 not out from 213 balls against South Africa, a match Australia won. His run to 200 that day was famously the fastest double century, by balls faced, in Test history up to that point, a record that stood for well over a decade before it was eventually broken. It sits alongside four other innings past 140 among his best five: 162 against New Zealand at the Basin Reserve in 2005, 152 against England at Edgbaston in 2001, the Hobart 149 not out, and 144 against Sri Lanka at Asgiriya Stadium in Kandy in 2004.
Fifty-nine balls at the WACA
Gilchrist's reputation for pure hitting speed was best captured not by his highest scores but by one of his shorter ones. In the third Test of the 2006-07 Ashes at the WACA Ground in Perth, with Australia already well on top and the urn effectively retained, he made 102 not out from only 59 balls, with 12 fours and 4 sixes, in a match Australia won by 206 runs. At the time it ranked among the fastest centuries, by balls faced, in Test history, behind only the mark Viv Richards had set two decades earlier. The innings was played in the closing overs of a match Australia had already all but won, but the speed of it, a Test century inside an hour, became one of the signature images of his career.
Walking
Gilchrist was also known, through much of his career, for walking when he knew he was out rather than waiting for the umpire's decision, a habit increasingly rare in the professional game and one that drew comment, admiration and occasional criticism in roughly equal measure. The most discussed example came in the 2003 World Cup semi-final against Sri Lanka, when he walked off after edging a catch behind the wicket that the umpire had given not out, a decision debated for years afterwards given what the match meant. It became one of the recurring talking points around his career, an old-fashioned gesture inside a game that had otherwise moved firmly towards leaving every decision to the umpires and, later, technology, and it sat oddly alongside the sheer violence of his batting, gentle manners wrapped around one of the most destructive games in the sport.
Gloves and numbers
Behind the stumps, Gilchrist kept to a fast, varied Australian attack through one of the most successful periods in the side's history, and his batting average from number seven, 47.61 across his whole career, sits closer to a specialist top-order batter's than any keeper before him had managed over a long career. He batted at seven in 100 of his 137 innings, and was similarly effective home and away, 45.88 in 55 Tests in Australia against a higher 50.24 in 38 Tests abroad, evidence that his attacking game held up wherever he played. He also briefly captained Australia, 6 Tests in the archive, winning 4 and losing 1, deputising for Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting when needed.
The numbers
The CricArcade archive, built from Gilchrist's 96 Test scorecards, records 137 innings, 5,570 runs at 47.61, with 17 hundreds and 26 fifties. His most productive opponent by average was New Zealand, 923 runs at 76.92 in 11 Tests, and his most productive decade was the 2000s, 5,130 runs at 46.64 from 91 Tests, the overwhelming majority of his career. The Sydney Cricket Ground was his most-visited venue, 11 Tests for 730 runs. Australia won 73 of the 96 Tests Gilchrist played, lost 11 and drew 12, one of the strongest winning records of any long-serving player in the archive, and he is credited with 7 player-of-the-match awards.
Sources
- CricArcade player page: full career record, best innings and scorecard links
- ESPNcricinfo: Adam Gilchrist player profile and Test career statistics
- Wisden Cricketers' Almanack: the 1999 Hobart Test and the 2006 Perth Ashes Test reports
- Wikipedia: Adam Gilchrist