Even though he is a wicketkeeper, Ian Healy is best described as a gloves-off cricketer. A proud and uncompromising professional, he plays for keeps. So forceful is his personality on point-duty that he elicits strong and mixed emotions from opponents, spectators and journalists alike. Indeed, at the start of the 1993 Ashes campaign, he was regarded as much for the strength of his resolve, his unremitting competitiveness and an extraordinarily high threshold of physical pain as he was for his talent as a player.
Born in Brisbane on April 30, 1964, Ian Andrew Healy moved to proud sporting country when his father, a bank manager, was transferred 600 kilometres north to the town of Biloela. It was 1972, the year Rod Marsh traded his iron gloves for silk gloves in England and along the way inspired Healy to start a career as a wicketkeeper.
Four of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year in 1994 were members of Australia’s triumphant Ashes side from the previous summer. One of them was Ian Healy, their voluble but brilliant wicketkeeper.
However, by the end of Australia’s triumphant tour he had emerged as a wicketkeeper-batsman of outstanding ability, having established a particularly memorable collaboration with the leg-spinner Shane Warne. Poised and precise, he completed 26 dismissals (21 catches and five stumpings), a record in a Test series in England, and so upheld the wicketkeeping traditions of his native Queensland which numbers Don Tallon and Wally Grout among its finest sporting sons.
His batting at No.7 was neither as technically correct nor as aesthetically pleasing but its effectiveness was undeniable and his 296 runs were gathered at 59.20 – an average beyond the reach of any of his opponents. His total included, at Old Trafford, his maiden first-class century.
Healy had a hand in the design of the new Australian team blazer paraded before an unsuspecting public at the start of the 1993/94 season. Once employed as a salesman in his in-laws’ Brisbane fashion agency, Healy welcomed the arrival of what he described as an honour blazer. That says it all, really.
By his final Test in 1999, Ian Healy’s reputation as one of Australia’s greatest wicketkeepers was assured. In 199 Tests, he made 395 dismissals and hit 4,356 runs at 27.39.
