Adam Gilchrist

Adam Gilchrist, voted Australia's finest ever one-day cricketer, the man who has hit more 6's in Test cricket that any other and Australia's most successful wicketkeeper, played for Richmond for the 1989 season. He has remained a great friend to the Club. His 1999 World Cup Shirt hangs in the bar and each year, he sponsors a young Australian to follow in his footsteps and come to Old Deer Park to develop as a cricketer and as a person. He is a Vice-President of the Club and oftens appears in our bar when in the UK.

During his season with Richmond, Adam was a prolific run-scorer, scoring over 2700 runs in the season. He got5 off to a flying start, recording 996 runs before the end of May. As a result of this success and because 1989 also saw an Ashes series in the UK, one of our members, Robin Pearson, arranged for the BCC to interview this prodigy. This video and the story behind it, in Robin's own words, are shown here.

As I was the “News Editor” mentioned on the webpage I thought that you (and RCC website browsers) might like to know the background to the Gilchrist item.

In those days sport on the BBC local news programme (Newsroom South East) was covered by a reporter called Michael Wale. He was a bit of an eccentric whose real sporting interests were horse racing and rowing (he was a cox). But he also followed club cricket and was a non playing member at Shepherds Bush. As he had to fill about 5 minutes every day on the programme, he was always open to suggestions about what would be worth covering. Barely anyone on the programme apart from him, his producer and myself had any real interest in sport so it was always quite easy to put forward ideas that would be considered for transmission. Hence in addition to the Gilchrist item, Richmond also featured in two other items on the programme – a preview of a National Knock Out quarter final against Weston-Super-Mare in 1986, and some action from a game at South Hampstead in 1990 which included an interview with Penguin.

Anyway, the Gilchrist item was approved, and I had a quick chat with Adam to make sure that he was happy to be interviewed, which he was. Michael Wale and the crew duly turned up at ODP before a mid week Cup game. Plenty of action was shot in the nets just in case the unthinkable happened and Richmond were in the field. The crew had to leave by mid afternoon so that the item could get on the air by early evening and the last thing we wanted were shots of Adam standing around in the field (the future Australian wicket keeper didn’t get to put on the gloves at RCC). Prior to the game Adam and Chris Goldie both gave good interviews, which is not always the case as many sports interviews are what one might call a “challenge” to edit into any sort of cohesive structured thought.

Luckily (or perhaps following collusion by the skippers, I’m not sure) Richmond batted first and Adam opened the innings with Ricky Cameron. Sod’s Law naturally dictated that after a summer full of centuries, Adam barely made double figures before getting out. Ricky made a good score but virtually all of his shots ended up on the cutting room floor!

Michael Wale and crew made it back to base at Elstree by about 4.30 and we managed to stitch it together in the edit suite, using every one of Adam’s attacking shots, ready for transmission by 6.30pm. Fortunately Chris’s comments about Adam’s talent turned out to be prophetic, and the BBC archive was duly enriched by the best sporting “before they were famous” since QPR and England star Gerry Francis featured as a 12 year old in an item about pigeon racing.

The likelihood of such an item being considered nowadays for transmission on the local news is virtually zero. Reporters are obsessed with the leading teams and players and pay little attention to grass roots sport. So despite his quirky unorthodox style, the likes of Michael Wale are now sadly missed.