Anthony Christodoulou 🇦🇺🇨🇾🇬🇷🍉

Adam Gilchrist has the most Test runs ever scored from number seven, a strike rate no batter of his era except Sehwag could beat, and a hundred Test sixes. He was so good that the strongest argument against him is that his team won too often for him to prove any of it. Gilly's career is fascinating, and it starts with the position. Number seven in Test cricket is where you put a defensive anchor or somebody to shepherd the tail. So it is not really a batting position, it is closer to a job description. Gilchrist scored 3,948 runs there, a record for the slot. Overall he averaged 47.60 at a strike rate of 81.95, and among every batter of his era with 2,000-plus Test runs, only Virender Sehwag beat that. He hit 100 sixes, and he was the first man in history to reach that mark in Tests. On top of that, he kept wicket to Warne, McGrath and Lee while doing it, and finished with 416 dismissals, which is still an Australian record. That's why he was not a wicketkeeper who could bat. He was an elite batter who happened to wear the gloves. He did not do the number seven job, he deleted it and invented a different one, and every selector in world cricket spent the next decade hunting for their own version of him. So why, after a career of that standard, do people still argue against him? Because of the team he played in, which is the strangest complaint anyone can make about a cricketer. Australia won the overwhelming majority of his 96 Tests, usually by an innings or by margins that made the fourth innings irrelevant. As a result, Gilchrist batted only 15 times in a fourth innings across his entire career. Hayden, Langer and Ponting kept knocking off targets or building leads nobody could reach, so Gilly spent most of a decade in the pavilion with his pads on, waiting for a crisis his teammates kept preventing. But when the crisis did come, he was exactly what you would want. In Hobart in 1999, his second Test, Australia were chasing 369 against Pakistan and in serious trouble. Gilchrist made 149 not out off 163 balls, added 238 with Justin Langer, and won it. In Kandy in 2004, Australia were bowled out for 120, with Muralitharan taking four wickets, and trailed by 91. With Ponting injured, Gilchrist volunteered to walk in at number three, not seven, and made 144 off 185 balls on a spinning pitch to set up a target of 352. Australia won by 27 runs. That is the point people miss when they say he only arrived once the damage was done. He was not a flat-track specialist waiting for easy runs. He was a match-winner in a team that kept winning matches before he was needed. Had that side been less dominant, I suspect his average finishes comfortably past 50. But then it would not have been that side. And half the fun of watching Gilchrist bat was knowing the game was already gone and he was going to bury it anyway. Happy birthday, Gilly.