When Adam Craig Gilchrist sat down in December 1989 for his A-level equivalent HSC exams at Kadina High School in Lismore, a small town of around 25,000 people in northern New South Wales, he might have considered himself at a disadvantage – undercooked, in the local idiom – having been absent for the whole of Year 12’s middle two terms. Then again, given the vocation that had already by that stage started whispering softly in his ear, he may also have thought that spending five months in London playing for Richmond in the Middlesex County League (MCL) was the perfect education. A boy of seventeen when he arrived, a man of seventeen when he departed, it’s fair to say the polite, unassuming kid that had left New South Wales five months’ earlier got straight A’s for his summer’s work, contributing immensely to a season the club and his teammates will never forget.

Initially, though, recalls First XI captain Chris Goldie, they didn’t know what to expect, “to the extent that, after an underwhelming first weekend, I didn’t pick him for our penultimate Saturday friendly prior to the start of the league season. Graham Roope [the former Surrey and England batsman] had phoned me to say he was living locally and looking to join a local club. It’s the 17-year-old Australian who hasn’t scored any runs or the bloke with 20-odd Test caps, you know?”

However, on the Thursday that week, too late for weekend selection to be changed, Richmond played the first round of the Bertie Joel Cup, a competition entered by most of the top clubs of London and the Home Counties. Goldie wasn’t available, but kept abreast of the game against Metropolitan Police of the Surrey Championship from his office. “I remember ringing the bar phone at the club mid-afternoon to see how we were getting on. I spoke to our Second XI captain, Ricky Cameron, a West Indian, who was skippering on the day. His response was, ‘We are doing okay. The boy Gilchrist just got his ton and we’re 200 for 0’. Adam ended up with 159 not out that day.” He was up and running.

“On the Saturday, playing for the twos at Finchley,” Goldie continues, “he scored 113 not out – seven fours and five sixes – and finished the match before the last hour. On the Sunday, he scored 112 against a strong Wimbledon first team. By the end of May he had 996 runs for Richmond and had earned himself the nickname ‘Boy Wonder’.” Back home, Boy Wonder’s local newspaper, the Northern Star, ran the headline: Adam Gilchrist Terrorising the Poms. It wouldn’t be the last time.

Those 384 runs for once out in four days suggest he went pretty well with the bat in those early May matches, but Gilchrist – he of the 416 Test victims, second only to Mark Boucher – didn’t have the gloves. Not in the league, at least. Goldie had kept in the 1982 Benson & Hedges Cup for the Combined Universities side skippered by Derek Pringle and later spent three years at Hampshire. Plus, he was skipper.

Nor was he the only player with pedigree in the Richmond dressing room. Sitting on 90-odd not out against Met Police when Goldie rang was Michael Roseberry, who later scored over 10,000 first-class runs for Middlesex as opener. Also in the top four were Trevor Brown – who represented England Schoolboys and was offered a professional deal by Leicestershire only to have it withdrawn when he told them he was going to university – and Rupert Cox, who would play 19 first-class games for Hampshire between 1990 and ’94, scoring a Championship hundred against Worcestershire at New Road. There was Roope, too, albeit only for that pre-season friendly (in which he scored a ton) and the first league match (a duck), before he headed off to play for Preston in the Northern League.

The new ball was taken by Andrew ‘Animal’ Jones, who had played three first-class matches for Somerset four years earlier and was the hard-partying wingman to the previous season’s overseas, Dean Waugh (brother of), while the attack’s key man was 55-year-old left-arm spinner Peter Ray. Known as ‘The Penguin’ thanks to an uncanny resemblance to the actor Burgess Meredith from the cult 1960s Batman TV series, Ray was rated by Goldie as better than Phil Edmonds and Phil Tufnell, both of whom he’d seen at close quarters in the Middlesex League. The former Times and Telegraph cricket correspondent Michael Henderson rated him the best after-dinner speaker he ever heard, too. He was as “cantankerous and miserable” on the field, says Goldie, as he was gregarious off it, and he would finish, at 64, with a record number of top-flight MCL scalps and its all-time best figures of 10-57. In such company, Gilly’s stripes would have to be earned.

The Middlesex League was young – the same age as Gilchrist when he arrived in London – having emerged, belatedly, from a longstanding, and ongoing, tradition of competitive friendlies in the south east. It may have lacked the seasoned superstar pros of some of the venerable leagues further north, but it was unquestionably tough cricket – along with the Birmingham League, arguably the best in the country at the time – the standard beefed up by a steady flow of graduates gravitating to London to join the professions. It was exactly the sort of challenge envisaged by Gilchrist’s father when he paid Adam’s way across.

Richmond had only managed one top-half finish in the previous seven MCL seasons, with fourth – in 1976 and ’77 – their highest ever finish. Finchley had won six of those first 17 titles, with another five clubs bagging two. Among those were Enfield – the reigning national knockout champions, having seen off Wolverhampton the previous August – and Teddington, who lost the national final in 1987 to an Old Hill side featuring Dean and Ron Headley, but would win it in both 1989 and 1991.

When he wasn’t churning out those hundreds, Gilchrist spent some of the pre-season doing manual work, clearing the ancient ditches that separate Richmond’s Old Deer Park ground just south of the river (or east, given the Thames’ longitudinal course at those coordinates) from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, a World Heritage Site whose 163-feet pagoda peers at the cricket over tall trees and the adjacent London Welsh rugby pitch, Richmond CC’s co-tenants since 1957 on a ground still owned by the Crown.

“It was called a ha-ha,” says Goldie, “a dry moat around old country estates to keep the livestock in without having a fence spoil the view for the Lord. Adam cleared it out with Big Albert Helg, a New Zealander who played rugby league, although I suspect Adam mainly stood around holding rakes. I’m not sure whether he was paid, but if he was it would be the only money he got off Richmond. We didn’t charge him subs or match fees, obviously, but that was about it.”

The league campaign – one game each against the other seventeen teams, an expansion of two from the previous year – finally got underway on May 13. It was timed cricket with no over limits, a continuation of the pre-league traditions, and clubs could decide whether they wanted to play all-day games (11.30 starts) or half-day (2pm starts). There were 10 points for a win, four for a winning draw, one for a losing draw, and none for a defeat. “As declaration matches,” says Goldie, “there were no restrictions on first innings overs so theoretically the side batting first could bat as long as they wanted. Losing the toss was not an advantage when playing a weaker side on a flat pitch!”

Richmond began with a draw at reigning champions South Hampstead, Gilchrist stumped off Sussex’s rookie off-spinner Bradleigh Donelan for 32. This dismissal was not a harbinger of the cavalier dasher of his later years, though, the first man to hit 100 sixes in Test cricket, a player who scored 260 runs (54, 57 and 149) in his three World Cup final wins off a combined 188 balls. “The thing that stood out was his maturity, both on the field and off,” remarks Trevor Brown. “He wasn’t then what he later became. He didn’t go in and smash the ball all over the park, although there were moments in friendlies and other cricket where you could see he could do it. He just had a big appetite for scoring huge amounts of runs and once he got in, he didn’t get out.”

Gilchrist made 93 on the Sunday in a friendly against Met Police, which was followed by the first of three straight league wins – against new additions Cockfosters – in which, opening the batting with Roseberry, he fell for just eight. But there was another Sunday ton against Beckenham, followed on Tuesday by 72 against Wimbledon in the Bertie Joel, setting up Gilchrist nicely for the visit of Brondesbury, alma mater of Mike Gatting, whose main threat was the former Indian Test left-arm spinner Dilip Doshi.

“It’s the only section of it that remains,” says Goldie. “We’re thinking of having it restored. If we do, we should probably have a blue plaque put up: This ha-ha was cleared by Australian Test cricketer– … No, the clearing of this ha-ha was supervised by Adam Gilchrist in 1989.”