Adam Gilchrist’s innovative batting redefined modern cricket. He blazed the second fastest Test hundred — in 57 balls, a ball slower than Viv Richards’s record. He also held the record for the fastest double hundred in Tests — off 212 balls.
It is knocks like these that saw him emerge in 2004 as the fastest Test run-scorer of all time in a research conducted by Wisden. In 2005, he was voted the "World's Scariest Batsman" in a poll of international bowlers. Nobody knows that better than bowlers around the world who have felt the remorseless and relentless savagery of this dexterous Western Australian destroyer. His strike-rate is amongst the highest in both Tests and ODIs.
Gilchrist will be remembered for playing the game in the true spirit, choosing to walk when he knew he was out than wait for the umpire’s decision. He approach seemed an anachronism in a modern game pock-marked with theatrics and hypocrisy and where players use every trick and tactics, both inside and outside the book, to mislead the umpire.
Gilchrist may not have been in the same class of Ian Healy as a ’keeper, but he was top class, proof of which is his stumping of Craig McMillan’s stumping off a 136 kmph delivery bowled by Glenn McGrath in a 2005 ODI.
The “c Gilchrist b McGrath” line was as monotonous as the “c Marsh b Lillee” line in the past. The latter effected 90 dismissals, five behind the “Marsh-Lillee” combine.
Gilchrist played 96 Tests without a break for a world record 414 dismissals, 17 centuries and 5,570 Test runs at an average of 47.60 — a number that hovered over 60 halfway through his career. His ability and frequency to strike the ball long earned him the distinction of the first man in Test history to hit 100 sixes. He also plundered 16 ODI hundreds from 287 ODIs.
A big stage player, Gilchrist is the only player to chalk up 50-plus scores in three successive World Cup finals – all three being match-winning efforts. His 149 in the 2007 edition remains the highest in any World Cup final. It was in that year that 39% of the 168 players who represented Australia in ODIs voted him as the greatest player to ever represent their country in the abridged version of the game. Gilchrist was truly in a league of his own.
