Adam Gilchrist has teeth to die for and his batting
wasn’t bad either, says Nicholas Shakespeare
It is hard to be an English cricket fan in Tasmania. “We’re going to murder you next year,” was one of the milder sledgings I received in the corner store when I commiserated over Australia’s Ashes defeat in 2005. And murder us they did. Still, as I struggle to teach my sons cricket on Nine Mile Beach, I nurture a fantasy that Max – aged 8, b. Wiltshire – will one day open the bowling for England against Benedict – aged 5, b. Hobart (in the same hospital as Tasmania’s most famous son but unremarkable slip catcher, Errol Flynn).
Tasmania’s influence on the cricket pitch has never looked firmer than since the retirement of David Boon, “the keg on legs”. A Tasmanian, Ricky Ponting, captains Australia. A Tasmanian, tall and wiry Troy Cooley, one of the fastest bowlers the state has produced, coached England during that summer of 2005, exciting the local headline: “Losing the Ashes to England, it’s just not cricket.” And, helping to determine just what is cricket, is another Tasmanian, Keith Bradshaw, chief executive of MCC since 2006.
Gilly changed
the nature of
Test cricket
I was ignorant of the game’s influence on my own work until The Wisden Cricketer’s deputy editor pointed out that a novel I had set in Tasmania, Secrets of the Sea, was wriggling with cricket references. (A country estate agent is known as “the David Boon of real estate”; the Australian heroine, concerned about her inability to have children, tells her husband, the son of English parents, that she is driving to Launceston for a test. “A Test? Are England playing?”) Alerted, I flick through my latest novel to discover the central character “batting away” a difficult question. Moreover, whenever he thinks of God the image that floats to mind is of a tall man gesticulating from the boundary. The novel ends with hero and heroine walking out into the winter night “to face whatever the darkness was about to bowl at them”.
It was my grandfather, the writer SPB Mais, who kindled this interest. He was a “duffer and rabbit of the first order” who, in a long village cricket career, never got called upon to bowl and was noted for dropping catches. But he risked prison – and even lost his family home near Brighton – in an ultimately successful battle with the local council for the right of Southwick Cricket Club to continue playing on the village green. And while he did not live to watch my favourite cricketer chip one of his gracefully timed boundaries, he would have applauded my choice and not given a brass razoo that I have chosen an Australian; he would, in fact, share the unmodish conviction that it is how you play the game that matters a lot more than who you play it for.
I was in Tasmania in November 2007 when Adam Gilchrist hit his 100th Test six at Hobart, slogging Muttiah Muralitharan out of the ground. The innings was typical of Gilly, a reminder of how he had changed the nature of Test cricket. A fast-hitting left-hander – like all the great batsmen – he legitimised its passing from a slow sport to a one-day speed. For 120 years it goes along at 2.5–3.5 runs an over. Then Gilchrist comes in and now 4.5 runs is considered quite attainable. On this November day he made an unbeaten 67. No one could have hit the ball more sweetly or in his own way. Few people have invented a shot; it’s as rare as inventing a new knot for a tie. One thinks of Grace, Ranji’s leg glance . . . and Gilchrist’s signature chip over slips.
Also in Hobart three days earlier Gilchrist had won the player’s poll for Australia’s greatest one-day international player. His modest reaction was in keeping with what, for Gilchrist admirers, is saintly about him. Even his surname has Christ in it.
He did not come into the national team until quite late – waiting around for Ian Healy to leave. So he had catching up to do. But his furious pace was only part of it. There was, for instance, that cap, his ears peeking out from underneath. You never saw him without it. Nor did you hear him sledge. And he had such a healthy, clean-living face. “The excellent Western Australian teeth Martin Amis would give his left testicle for,” as one friend put it.
Sometimes, one suspected,
he walked even without
being out
He’s inventing shots; he’s scoring faster; he’s hitting harder than anyone else. And then, to top it all, he has to keep wicket to Shane Warne. He has to keep wicket to the best bowler who’s ever been. But it’s a double act. A bowler like that needs a keeper like that to keep him going.
He retired at the top of his game (timing again) the day after passing a record 416 Test dismissals. His batting average was in the high 40s and included the second fastest Test century. In an age of celebrity he was that, too, without wanting to be anything more than a sportsman.
And then there was his walking. Sometimes, one suspected, he walked even without being out. But if he stayed, you could be damn sure there was no doubt. In cricket the umpire’s decision is right, even if he’s wrong. What Gilchrist did, in the way cricket tends to throw up paradoxes, was to say: sometimes when the umpire’s right, he’s wrong.
As Max Davidson writes in his book on sportsmanship, It’s Not the Winning That Counts: “Now that Gilchrist has retired, the honesty he epitomised remains the template by which other cricketers will be judged.”
NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE is a journalist and author. He is the author of the novel Secrets of the Sea and the travelogue In Tasmania