A brilliant opening batter who played 66 Tests for Australia between 1964 and 1976, Victoria's Ian Redpath has joined the greats in Australia cricket's Hall of Fame
Adam Burnett
27 January 2023, 04:00 PM AEST
@AdamBurnett09
It was just last week that Ian Redpath made his way from Geelong up to Melbourne to talk about old times with old friends.
Redpath, who was today unveiled as one of two 2023 inductees into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame, took much delight in lunching with a quartet of his Baggy Green brethren – Ian Chappell, Paul Sheahan, Bob Cowper and Keith Stackpole; men with whom he shares a passion for the sport that has played such an instrumental role in his life.
"It was terrific," the 81-year-old tells cricket.com.au. "We try to do that once a year, when everyone's in town.
"That's one of the sad things – you spend half your youth living very closely with these guys, and making very good friends, and then when you're finished, they disperse all over Australia and you only see them very occasionally.
"So it's sad in that sense, but they're everlasting friendships."
Redpath was only 21 when he passed an acid test which, 60 years later, he believes put his career on the trajectory it ultimately followed. Ironically, that test came against six other Australia Test players in a Richie Benaud-led New South Wales team. It was just his fifth first-class match, and second appearance in the Sheffield Shield.
"I was fortunate the (state) selectors were patient – my first five innings (for Victoria) I don't think I made it to double figures, so I could feel a sharp knife at the back of my neck," he says.
"But the vital game for me was against New South Wales. They had a terrific side, and I was like a startled rabbit in the headlights in the first innings (out for two, bowled Frank Misson).
"People had been talking about Alan Davidson, and for the second innings they had to push me out the door, but he did me a great favour – he tore his hamstring and I didn't have to face him.
"So in the second innings I was facing Richie Benaud and they said, 'Don't play back to his flipper, because it comes straight on'. I said, 'Yes, yes, yes' and of course I padded up, it was an inch outside off stump and I was not out.
"Then I thought, Well, it's you or me, so I charged down the wicket, played a beautiful cover drive and nicked it between Bobby Simpson (at first slip) and the 'keeper, away for two or three (laughs).
"That was the let-off I needed, and I finished up with 40 not out."
Redpath went on to score 56 in Adelaide and 89 in Perth, and before the season was out, he made a career-best 261 against a Queensland side boasting West Indies legend Wes Hall. Within 12 months, he was making his Test debut at the MCG.
He made 97 in his very first innings on his home patch, and looking back, the 66-Test veteran says he is "probably more disturbed about it today than I was then", given he couldn't have known it would be another 27 Tests before he finally broke through for three figures.
In between however, Redpath built his career in Australia's middle order off the back of an assured defence, stylish shot-making and an ability to occupy the crease for long periods.
And well before his maiden hundred arrived, there was no shortage of memorable moments: he led successful fourth-innings run chases in Leeds (58no) and Cape Town (69no) in 1964 and 1967 respectively; and his 41 and 79 at the Gabba against India in January 1968 proved a match-winning double.
Former Queensland allrounder Tom Veivers remembers batting with the Victorian at the Wanderers in that famous Test win against a strong South African side.
"He was a tremendous batsman," says Veivers, who has maintained his friendship with Redpath across state lines for more than 50 years. "An excellent bloke to build a partnership with.
"We'd lost that first Test in Johannesburg, and then we were chasing 180 in Cape Town in that last innings. When I came out to bat we were four down, and 'Redders' was there.
"They were bowling very well, the wicket was doing a bit, but I hit a couple of sixes, and he just kept going. We both ended up not out in what was a pretty famous win.
"That was probably my most memorable match with him; the guys gave us a lot of praise and encouragement after that."
Redpath says he thrived off lining up alongside the likes of Simpson and Bill Lawry, men he feels "played as though their lives depended on it", and while he stops short of describing himself in the same terms, he offers this instead: "It was serious business in my mind, playing for Australia, and I tried hard – put it that way".
All these years later, Redpath suspects with a wry smile that the timing of his breakthrough hundred (a second-innings 132 against West Indies at the SCG in February 1969, just over five years after his debut) was not merely happenstance.
"I got married between the (Adelaide and Sydney) Test matches," he smiles. "And I'd been hit in the face by Charlie Griffiths about two days before the wedding, and my darling (fiancée Christine) was coming out from England … she heard on the radio that I'd been sconed and didn't know whether I was dead or alive.
"But we got married, were in Lorne for a week, she flew back to England, I flew up to Sydney, and I managed to get a few in the second dig."
As a married man, Redpath scored eight hundreds and 21 fifties in 39 Tests, averaging 49.18. He singles out his 159no in Auckland in 1974, when he carried the bat in a series-levelling Australian win, as perhaps his finest hundred, but rather appropriately, his best performance might not have been a three-figure effort. Instead, his second-innings 63 – when no other batter reached 25 – in the fifth Test against India in Chennai in 1969 was decisive in sealing a famous series triumph for Australia.
"Hundreds are OK but I don't think that's the be-all and end-all," he says. "I think that may have been one of my better innings. To make 60 or 70 on a real turning wicket was pretty satisfying."
Retirement came when he was at the top of his game, after the demands of international cricket had required a degree of selfishness and he couldn't bring himself to leave home on another international tour. Instead he called time on his career to run an antiques business with his wife Christine, who died in 2021.
The couple had four children – three daughters and a son – through Redpath's playing days, and even now his admiration for the way his late wife ran both a business and a household amid his frequent absences shines through in the way he speaks about her.
A generation later he returned to the game, this time as coach of Victoria in tandem with Stackpole. Though they never won a title, Redpath relished the role in which he saw the likes of Damien Fleming and Paul Reiffel reach their full potential.
"I loved it," he says. "I really did. It was as rewarding as playing sometimes, just to see the development of young fellas."
Now he joins a good number of his Baggy Green peers as a member of the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame. It is an honour he shares with his children – two of whom live in Switzerland, but were recently home for Christmas, and two of whom live in nearby Barwon Heads.
"They were delighted," he says. "It was fantastic, because they were the ones, plus my wife, who suffered the most with me being away so much, so they were very, very pleased."
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