exclusive
Adam Gilchrist was contemplating retirement before 57 balls of sweet summer song revitalised his career

It’s the song of the Australian summer, that meeting of kookaburra ball on bat. That sweet spot crack only batters blessed with acute hand-eye alliance, supple wrists and forearms laden with might and power truly know. Adam Gilchrist hadn’t heard the music for so long he’d talked himself into retirement. And then it fell from the sky like a gift from the cricket gods. First a verse, next a chorus. Gilchrist’s Puma blade found its rhythm and produced an anthem for the ages that blended classical, modern jazz and thunderous, foot-stomping heavy metal. December 16, 2006, was the day Gilchrist brought the WACA Ground and his own Test career to life, while helping Australia take a firm grip on the Ashes. Now part of the Fox Cricket team that will call the five-Test Australia-India series, Gilchrist scored 5570 runs, took 379 catches and executed 37 stumpings in 96 Tests to stake a claim as the greatest wicketkeeper-batsmen to have played the game. The last of his 17 centuries, a 57 ball-ton plucked from a horror stretch of form, fell just one short of West Indian great Viv Richards’ record. THE LEAD UP Gilchrist had been in a form trough with the bat, making just 270 runs in his previous 12 Test innings, only three scores of more than 12 and three ducks, one of which came in the first innings of the WACA Test, the third of the series, with Australia 2-nil up. “I’d been having a pretty strong wrestle with the game and myself since the ’05 Ashes,” Gilchrist told The West Australian. “I’d had a few little self-doubts creep in, I wasn’t able to find a way to break completely free and nail any big scores. “It felt like I wasn’t contributing with the bat and it didn’t help when I played a negative, tentative shot to Monty Panesar in the first innings and was caught at bat-pad for a fourth-ball duck. “That probably showed my mindset, that I was a bit bogged with the game.” Before he left the ground that afternoon, Gilchrist called his manager Steven Atkinson. “I let him know I was probably going to retire at the end of the series,” Gilchrist said. “I said ‘I’m done, I’ll wind It up’ because I didn’t feel like I was progressing forward in any manner. “I hung up from him and drove home and by the time I’d got there Steven had rung (Gilchrist’s wife) Mel. I walked in the door and Mel said ‘So you’re retiring are you?’. “She just laughed at me and got a bit serious and said you are just sulking because you are having a tough run and just got a duck. “Then she pointed out that I was feeling sick and sorry for myself and not looking at the broader picture and trying find ways to move ahead. “That helped settle me but I think in my mind I still thought ‘Nah, I‘m done, I’m going’. But that may have well helped me by the time I got around to the next innings.” THE SET UP The home side had taken a 19-run advantage in the first innings and had set up a seemingly impregnable lead in the second, through a tenacious century from Michael Hussey, scores of 92 from opener Matthew Hayden, 75 from the skipper Ricky Ponting. Michael Clarke was also on his way to a ton. By the time Hussey was dismissed for 103, the temperature was approaching 39C and as Gilchrist strode to the centre of the WACA the heat was on both in a meteorological and metaphorical sense. It was a nervous start. Gilchrist defended his first ball, the last of Panesar’s over, to the legside, before the Australian keeper’s nemesis and the England captain, Andrew Flintoff, came on. First up, Gilchrist managed to shoulder arms to a good ball angling into him, but the first of two sliding doors moments of his career were about to unfold before the over was finished. Gilchrist pushed at the next ball, off a tempting, nagging length, and it flew, mercifully, just wide of gully, but it was an anxious moment. “As was the way against England every time I walked out there, Freddy was around the wicket,” Gilchrist said. “I might have benefited from the heat and Freddy being captain and the workload he had and might have been fatigued. “I remember getting an uppish, thick outside that flew to the gully region and thinking ‘Oh dear, there is another pair for me’, but it went into a gap where typically there was always two or three fielders in that area with the plans they had for me. “But there was enough gap there that it got through to the boundary. So that was a bit of good fortune.” The next ball was pushed into the covers just as the Barmy Army found voice before he was rapped on the pads going for a big pull shot. Flintoff’s loud appeal was turned down, the ball clearly high. And then came that sweet sound of reassurance. The fifth ball of the over. The catalyst of a cornucopia of delights for cricket lovers and a shot that helped Gilchrist extend his Test career by another 13 months. A flushed drive off the back foot, with Japanese train timetable precision. “It was not dissimilar to the one that I edged but just moved a fraction better,” he said. “I can’t say that at that moment I was on or that something really big was about to unfold, but that really made me think maybe I don’t need to be too shackled and pinned down by this feeling of cloudiness in my mind. “From that moment on, I felt like I was a beneficiary of that 39 degree day. Huss had scored a hundred. Pup was closing in on a hundred. And we already had a 300-run plus lead. “So it was not a bad time to go out and bat.” Gilchrist also reflected on that negative, tentative shot he’d played to Panesar in the first innings. “Walking off in that first innings, I said to myself if I ever face Monty again, I’m at least going to get caught on the boundary if he is going to get me out. I am not going to get caught at bat-pad. I am going to go really aggressive against him. “I’d always felt comfortable facing left-arm orthodox bowlers. It just seemed to be something I can deal with say, better than an off-spinner spinning it away from me.” And so it proved. Gilchrist was on the hunt. Panesar the hunted, conceding 24 off one over, the 106th off the innings, a drive off the second ball through cover giving the resurgent batter his half ton from 40 balls faced. That was followed by two monster straight sixes back over Panesar’s head and into row Z, another whip over midwicket for four, before Gilchrist ended the over with another straight six hit so hard and long that members of the crowd were bowing in gratitude. THE MESSAGE TO RICKY PONTING Gilchrist and Clarke were motoring. Australia had a big lead. They felt like they could go loco for a while and then put England in late in the day. But it was still only day three, giving the Poms plenty of time to chase a big total. “We got the 12th man out and told him to go and ask Punter whether it was OK to go flat out. I said: “It feels like we have them absolutely cooked. If we go flat out here for an hour or so, we can get near enough to 500 ahead and then have a bowl at them that night,” Gilchrist recalled. “We were trying to regain the Ashes. We had won the first two Tests so we were in a pretty dominant position, but it was only day three of the Test match so the other option was to really grind them out, bat til stumps, bat into the next day, and really shut them out. “So we sent the 12th man off and said ‘Don’t run back out, just give us a thumbs up to go for it, or a thumbs down to be conservative and survive til stumps’. “Pup and I are sure we saw a thumbs up. And that’s where I’ll leave that. “That’s about the time when Monty came on and I just said to Pup ‘I’m going to go flat out here’. “I managed to get 100 and we declared and I ran off and everyone was hooting and hollering and Punter (Ponting) was standing in the changeroom looking at me with an angry expression saying “What the …. was that?’ “Then he cracked a big smile and said ‘Well played’. He actually didn’t want us to go flat out. He seriously had said just bat conservatively and sure up our position. But we did get a wicket that night so I reckon it was justified.” THE VIV RECORD The 2006 Ashes Test in Perth attracted 103,440 fans, which remains the biggest aggregate, but Gilchrist reckons there must have been even more than that on the day of his majestic ton, given the number of fans who have told him they saw it live. “I didn’t know the WACA capacity was 160,000,” he said. Richards had made 100 off 56 balls against Englahd in St John’s Antigua in April 1986 . Everyone watching in the terraces at the WACA and on television was aware of Gilchrist closing in on Viv’s benchmark. Except Gilchrist. “I really had no idea. But if you had asked me before play that day who holds the record for the fastest 100 in Test cricket I would have said Viv Richards and I would have been right,” he said. “He was the master blaster after all. But if they had asked me how many balls? I would not have had the faintest idea. “Then into my innings, I didn’t know how many balls I had faced afterwards or even during it. I can’t even recall whether there was anything on the big screen at the ground. You had the old scoreboard and then the replay screen but that really just basic scores on it. I don’t recall seeing how many balls.” Would he have noticed anyway? “No. I was oblivious to it. I just knew that a declaration would come if I was able to get to 100, so I was trying to get there as quick as I could,” he recalled. Gilchrist had inched his way tantalisingly close to the record when Matthew Hoggard came on to bowl the 110th over of the innings. Hoggard took the pace off the first ball and Gilchrist punched it to long on for one run. He was on strike again in the fifth ball of that over on strike again but Hoggard, seemingly aware of his place in history, bowled a deliberate wide one for no run. The umpire didn’t call it. The outright record was out of Gilchrist’s reach, but he could still equal Viv. “That wide ball outside off stump that Matthew Hoggard delivered that I swung it and missed, I didn’t realise that that was the ball I needed to score some runs off,” he said. “Some may say it might have been a wide and I might have got another crack at it next ball? But as I said, I was totally oblivious to it.” The next ball, No 56, Gilchrist drove Hoggard. The crowd sensing history was on its feet, but a diving Flintoff got a hand on it at cover. Gilchrist took the single to take him to 98. The next ball he faced from Steve Harmison was another to drive to long on for two to mark the second-fastest century. Gilchrist can’t recall when he found out just how close he got. “Someone told me it flashed on the big screen when we were running off but I can’t remember,” he said. “My first reaction when I did hear was it was probably appropriate that Viv still held the record because he was the bloke who transformed the game with his style, technique, class and power. “He did his at a time when that was ridiculous at that stage of the evolution of the game, that someone could play an innings like that. “I didn’t think too much about it other than to say it was a huge honour to be mentioned in the same breath as Viv.” Gilchrist has worked with Richards as a Fox commentator on the Big Bash. “But I have never sat down with him and spoken about it,” he said. THE AFTERMATH “When I got home that night Mel said ‘Retiring now are you?’ and I said ‘Well, I reckon I might’. But no, it felt like someone had let the handbrake off,” he said. “I knew it had been released and it was a reminder of the fun you can have in the game of cricket which is why we start playing it at such a young age and you hope you can have that attitude with very game you play. “But the more you play and the more that’s riding on it, the mindsets and ge challenges and the psychology come into it. Australia won the Test and secured the Ashes, but Gilchrist says he will always look back on the innings through the lens of the fans. “It may come across as self-indulgent but it is nice to hear so many people say they know where they were when that innings was played,” he said. “It brings a nice, warm feeling to your heart knowing you have engaged with the most important stakeholders in the game, the fans.” Footnote: Kiwi enforcer Brendon McCullum took the record off Richards and Pakistan’s Misbah-ul-Haq, who scored a 56-ball ton against Australia in Abu Dhabi in 2014, with a 54-ball century against Australia in 2016 in his 101st and final Test match.

exclusiveAdam Gilchrist was contemplating retirement before 57 balls of sweet summer song revitalised his career

The No. 1 source of news for every West Australian

exclusive
Adam Gilchrist was contemplating retirement before 57 balls of sweet summer song revitalised his career