February 23, 2002.
It was the kind of sustained carnage unseen on a Test match ground. It was a savagery that led a normally sedate Wisden to remark, “Gilchrist was playing with them like a cat keeping a half-dead mouse alive for entertainment.”
When Gilchrist had walked out to bat in the last hour of the first day, the Proteans had just about clawed their way back into the Johannesburg Test. However, they ran into a blistering hurricane on the second day.
Riled by some offensive taunts from the crowd as he was walking in to bat, Gilchrist turned his focus on absolute destruction. Bowler after bowler — quite a handful of them including Andre Nel, Makhaya Ntini and Jacques Kallis — faced the bazooka of a bat as the ball disappeared to all corners of the ground. Gilchrist reached his fifty in 89 balls with 6 fours and a six. The second fifty took just 32 balls, and contained a further 6 boundaries and 2 sixes. An enthralling afternoon session produced 190 runs at 7.45 per over.
A hapless captain Mark Boucher, standing in for the injured Pollock, had to turn to the gentle medium pace of Neil McKenzie. Gilchrist, on 136, smashed him for 2, 4, 2, 6, 2, 4 — an annihilation almost poetic in its symmetry. In all the carnage, Gilchrist aimed for a million. A local gold mine had placed an advertising hoarding— safely positioned well beyond the crowd at deep mid-wicket — offering a solid gold ingot worth 1.3m Rand to any batsman who could hit it. McKenzie pitched short and Gilchrist, by now toying with the attack, pulled it hard and high, following the ball with his eyes, egging it on with his gestures, jumping up and down in excitement. He missed the target by a couple of metres, reacting animatedly at the close brush with a fortune.
At the time of the tea interval, Gilchrist was on 199 from 211 balls. The first ball he faced after tea was from Kallis and he struck it for his 19th boundary to get to his double-hundred. It also contained 8 savage sixes and came off 212 deliveries, the fastest double century at that time — 8 balls quicker than Ian Botham’s two-decade old record. Gilchrist also became the fifth wicketkeeper ever to get to 200, after Imtiaz Ali, Taslim Arif, Brendon Kuruppu and Andy Flower. The record has since been broken, but the echoes of those strokes still seem to reverberate across the stadium and the world till this day.