It's all Adam Gilchrist's fault

PL watches an ODI in Rawalpindi that almost passed under the radar

Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium during Australia’s 2022 Test

I used to say, half jokingly, that 50-over cricket’s downhill slide began the day Adam Gilchrist retired. You never wanted to miss a minute of Gilly batting, and it was agony if Australia batted in the second innings of an ODI because Channel 9 had half an hour of scheduled news to broadcast when my only interest was watching Adam clear his throat (and the pickets) at the top of the order.

Gilchrist played his last ODI for Australia a few months before the IPL’s first season.

A few years later, The Australian’s chief cricket correspondent, Malcolm Conn, walked despondently from the managing editor’s office having been told our plans to cover all of Australia’s games that summer, as we always did, had blown the budget. Connman sat down at my desk and gestured despondently toward his carefully laid out plans. “What are we going to do?” I knew immediately what we were going to do.

Covering ODI cricket was a pain in the arse, primarily because you had to file a story from the first innings for the first edition. You picked a theme, often a very thin one, and avoided any mention of an outcome to ensure country readers didn’t feel too cheated. That was then updated with more complete match coverage sometime before 11 pm. More diligent types would do a complete rewrite, but over the years, I became lazier and lazier, working out a way to put in a couple of paragraphs of match report over what we’d already written because, frankly, we were tired, and probably thirsty.

“Why don’t you just tell them that we’re not going to cover any of the ODIs this summer?” I suggested. Malcolm’s eyes lit up. He picked up his plans and marched back into the dragon’s den. The editor agreed without a moment’s hesitation, and we hardly ever covered an ODI - unless it was in our hometown - again.