Tuesday, July 16, 2002 It's official. Fewer and fewer Australian couples are having babies, more and more hit singles are obsessed with matters of love or sex, and nearly all wicketkeepers are dab hands with the bat too. But when does a fad become a fashion? When does a fashion become a trend? And when does a trend become an immutable way of everyday life?

Reports announcing the death of the non-batting, specialist wicketkeeper have been coming thick and fast lately. Don't believe them. They are hasty and exaggerated, a product of the hoopla surrounding the simultaneous rise of Adam Gilchrist, Andy Flower and Kumar Sangakkara - all sound glovemen, all resounding strokemakers - who between them have temporarily revolutionised the way balls are swatted and strategies plotted.

But only temporarily. It is not so long ago, after all, that a small queue of laughably inept batsmen were lining up behind the stumps: Zimbabwe's Tatenda Taibu, England's Chris Read, India's Mannava Prasad, Sri Lanka's Prasanna Jayawardene and the West Indian David Williams. Go back a little further and you had people like Bob Taylor and Bruce French (England), Wasim Bari, Anil Dalpat and Zulqarnain (Pakistan), and Guy de Alwis and Gamini Wickremasinghe (Sri Lanka).

An endangered species? Maybe. But claims that the specialist wicketkeeper is now formally extinct are grossly overblown.

Except in one corner of the globe. Of the last 11 Australian Test keepers, three of them - Adam Gilchrist, Roger Woolley and Wayne Phillips - have boasted first-class batting averages above 37, the point at which a wicketkeeper-batsman becomes a batsman-wicketkeeper. A further two, Rod Marsh and Ian Healy, averaged over 30. Tim Zoehrer, Greg Dyer, Kevin Wright and Phil Emery all averaged over 26. And John Maclean and Steve Rixon averaged over 23. Each of the 11 hit first-class centuries. Between them, they managed 73 hundreds and 275 fifties. If we take a career first-class average of 23 as the cut-off point, then Australia's most recent one-dimensional keeper was Brian Taber - 32 years ago.

It seems extraordinary, and it is happening everywhere you look. When Victoria played Queensland in the national under-15 final in March, Victoria's keeper went in at No. 3 while his opposite number opened the batting. At the 2000-01 under-19 championships, the traditional hothouse of Australia's Test side, six of the eight state keepers batted in the top six - three of them at No. 3. And four of Australia's seven regular first-class keepers - Ryan Campbell, Brad Haddin, Sean Clingeleffer and Gilchrist - are at least as proficient in front of the stumps as they are from behind. It is telling that Victoria's Darren Berry, a mediocre batsman, has totted up more matches and catches than any other wicketkeeper in Australian domestic history, but has never gone close to wearing the baggy green.

All of which may or may not be something to start worrying about. To date, thanks to a mixture of good luck and good management, Australia's emphasis on batting clout has largely paid off. When Rod Marsh was first picked for Australia he was probably not even the best wicketkeeper in Western Australia. But his swashbuckling bladesmanship ignited the lower order, his glovework improved beyond all recognition and, within a couple of years, his selection was indisputably an inspired one.

The Gilchrist experiment has worked even bigger wonders. When he made his Test debut in November 1999 Gilchrist was twice the batsman Healy was but only half the keeper. On the recent South African tour, some 28 months later, he was averaging 157 with the bat and snaffling acrobatic catches to his right that Healy, even in his pomp, would normally have left to first or second slip.

Two things, however, should be remembered. Firstly, Gilchrist is a freak, an aberration, a once-every-125-years cricketer. Secondly, we must never forget the lesson of Wayne Bentley Phillips - now, ironically enough, tutoring today's superstars-in-waiting at the academy in Adelaide. Phillips was a batsman of rich talents, but when he kept wicket for Australia in the mid-1980s at least two others - Queensland's Ray Phillips and NSW's Steve Rixon - were considerably defter glovemen. A young Timmy Zoehrer and the Victorian Michael Dimattina were probably not far behind.

And it showed. Every Phillips fumble begat an outfield stumble. Heads sunk with every catch flunked. Tongues hissed with every stumping missed. Phillips cannot be held solely to blame; Australian cricket in the mid-'80s would have been a shambolic mess with or without Wayne Phillips. But nor can it be entirely coincidental that it was only on the 1989 Ashes tour, when Healy firmly established himself as No. 1 keeper, that the Australians became demons in the field and assumed demonic status in most other fields too.

Don Tallon, Australia's greatest keeper of all according to many old-timers, was utterly unGilchristlike as a batsman. Yet his value was immeasurable: Clarrie Grimmett once said he would have taken twice as many wickets in his career had Tallon, rather than Bert Oldfield, been behind the stumps.

That is why Australia's selectors, when the time comes to choose Gilchrist's successor, must not simply plump for the keeper most likely to average 60. Sure, they should be pragmatic about it; a marginally inferior keeper who is a markedly superior batsman is always worth a punt. But his glovework, always his glovework, must be the principal selection criterion.

By then, however, it may well be too late. Australia's most talented glovemen, unable to get a game in their local under-14 park side, will have long since given up wicketkeeping and taken up goalkeeping instead.

This is good news for Australia's soccer team, who were beaten by New Zealand a couple of days ago - the footballing equivalent of losing to Kenya in an ODI. But for Australia's cricket team, the consequences - a return to the bad, sad, mad old days when Wayne Phillips was king and keeper - are too frightening to contemplate.

Chris Ryan is a former managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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