Dizzy knew historic double was the end

Even as he wrote his name into cricket’s history ledger by compiling the highest Test score from a designated nightwatchman and installed himself as a lifelong inspiration for tailenders the world over, Jason Gillespie sensed in his heart his international career was finished.

In the 10 years since he crowned his 31st birthday with one of the most audaciously improbable knocks the game was witnessed – 201no against Bangladesh in Chittagong – Gillespie has come to accept that the national selectors got it right by never again naming him for Australia.

Despite the fact he continued at first-class level for a further two years (in which he scored two more centuries, including one on his 32nd birthday when batting at number 11 for Yorkshire) and faintly clung to hope of a Test recall, he acknowledges now it was never going to happen.

The penny began to drop during a mid-pitch conversation with Michael Hussey, with whom Gillespie shared a 320-run fourth-wicket partnership, as the man entrusted to fill-in for Ricky Ponting at number three on that Chittagong Test’s first evening pushed on past 150 on its fourth day.

And it was informally confirmed at game’s end when vice-captain Adam Gilchrist, who had inherited responsibility for leading the Australia team’s victory song in Justin Langer’s enforced absence, bestowed that revered honour upon Gillespie.

"Deep down, I knew," Gillespie told cricket.com.au from Leeds - where he continues his coaching role with UK county champions Yorkshire - when asked if he suspected his epic nine-and-a-half-hour innings at Chittagong would be his last for his country. 

"I had a feeling, and a lot of the lads knew as well.

"Gilly (Gilchrist), and it’s one of the reasons why I love him so much, allowed me to lead the team song after that Test match and I’ve never spoken to him about it but I reckon that deep down he knew that was probably it for me as well and it’s why he afforded me that gesture.

"If I’m honest, having gone into coaching and now as head coach as well as head of selection at Yorkshire for a number of years, I know how difficult selections can be and sometimes you have to make a call.

"So I look back and realise that if I was chairman of selectors for Australia at that time I would have made the exact same call.

Image Id: ~/media/9D53C5F0B142419082D13156B6622E18 Image Caption: Gillespie celebrates his "bizarre" performance // Getty Images

"The next summer I did okay for South Australia (29 Sheffield Shield wickets at 23.93) but the reality was selectors have to know when it’s time to move a player on, and I think they got it spot-on with me."

Not that it prevented the former quick, whose 259 Test scalps has him seventh on Australia’s list of leading wicket-takers, from taking a typically mischievous dig at then selection chair Andrew Hilditch upon learning he had been dumped.

Hilditch, who had taken over the chairman’s role from Trevor Hohns during that Bangladesh Test series and whose first major assignment was to name Australia’s squad for the following summer’s home Ashes campaign against England, phoned Gillespie to tell him he was excluded.

Holding Man of the Match and Player of the Series gongs from Australia’s most recent Test series, in which he recorded a batting average of 231 and bowling average of 11.25 with his team winning 2-0, Gillespie half-seriously inquired of the chairman "is that decision based on my last performance?”

"But all jokes aside, I knew - I wasn’t stupid, and I was quite comfortable with that decision," he said this week.

He had already been on the end of a blunt reminder from Hussey about the frailties of Test incumbency during their historic stand when, having scored a century for the first time in any form of cricket (including backyard), Gillespie was almost bowled amid a wild swipe at Bangladesh seamer Mashrafe Mortaza.

Hussey marched down the pitch, summoned Gillespie to his side and advised the veteran turned novice that he would never again be gifted such a gilded opportunity to score a Test match double-century and he should guard vigilantly against throwing it away.

"I stood there listening to him saying ‘yeah, yeah, I hear you’ but then I turned to head back up the pitch and I was thinking ‘piss off Huss, I’ve done this once so I can certainly do it again'," Gillespie recalled.

"But by the time I’d left Huss and thought about it a bit, and got back to my crease I realised he was 100 per cent right – there was no chance in hell I was going to be in that position again, so I’d better pull my head in."

Image Id: ~/media/10B25573129944D0AA37D1FD663AAAD0 Image Caption: Gillespie and Hussey shared a record-breaking stand // Getty Images

But there was an even more compelling reason for Gillespie, whose previous highest Test score before his final match was an unbeaten 54 against New Zealand in Brisbane and whose career batting average entering Chittagong was 15, to stay out there.

Having stood his ground when his captain Ricky Ponting called him for a single early on the third day, which led to Ponting being run out for 52 and mightily displeased as a result, Gillespie understood that the centre wicket was the one place he could safely avoid the skipper’s undisguised wrath.

In uncharted terrain having never before come within a Ponting roar of a century in first-class ranks, Gillespie relied on his only vaguely relevant experience – the 90 he’d scored in E-grade for his Adelaide club team as a teenager – to carry him to three figures, and another hundred after that.

"I remember my approach to that innings (of 90 in fifth-grade) as if it was yesterday," Gillespie said.

"I thought at the time ‘I’ve had a pretty clear plan on how I’m going to approach this knock and I’ve got to 90’ so from that point they were just numbers – in order to get from 90 to 100 I would just continue to stick to my process and the scoreboard would look after itself.

"Once I reached 100 it seemed to me that the field was spread, there were a lot of gaps and they (Bangladesh) were essentially allowing me singles so I just took them.

"I’ve never been in that situation before so I thought 'I’ll stick to my game plan and keep going'.

"And it was a simple plan.

"If it was on the stumps I had to make sure my front pad was out of the way and back myself to hit the ball because if I was hit on the pads on that (low, slow) surface there was a good chance I’d be adjudged lbw.

"Then, if it was on my hips or leg side of me, I could work it through the on-side, if it was on the stumps I’d look to play nice and straight and hit the ball back to where it came from, and if it was outside off stump I’d look to be really positive.

"It sounds ridiculous but that’s as simple as I kept my batting.

"And also the fact that I ran out Ricky meant that, in my mind, I knew I couldn’t get out because I would cop it from the skipper when I went back to the rooms.

Image Id: ~/media/DF951E11F6764D0CBFF7FCF07328AC05 Image Caption: Gillespie and Ponting - before the former ran out the latter // Getty Images

"I didn’t want to go back into that dressing room and cop a spray from the captain – a deserved spray too because I was too wrapped up in my own defensive technique to be thinking about taking that run."

But Ponting remains the hero in what Gillespie described at the time as a "fairy tale" and, on reflection a decade later, still struggles with an adjective beyond "bizarre" to describe how he views a farewell performance "that literally came out of the blue".

Because it was Ponting who instructed his fast bowler to put on the pads and head out as nightwatchman if a wicket fell in the final hour of day one and who, in doing so, gifted Gillespie a priceless sportsman’s night yarn he’s been living off handsomely ever since.

"I’d done my job with the ball, got the wickets (3-11 in Bangladesh’s first innings), put my feet up and then the number-one batsman in the world at the time (Ponting) came up and asked me to do his job as well," Gillespie recounted, slipping into his sharply-honed shtick.

"I just remind them it was one of those rare wickets that seamed and spun, the cloud cover was really low so the atmosphere lent itself to a lot of swing as my bowling figures showed.

"So it was unbelievably tough conditions, but someone had to step up and do the captain’s job by batting number three."

And so it goes. For nine and a half hours.

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