Australian Test match ‘superfan’ Luke ‘Sparrow’ Gillian brings up incredible double ton at the home of cricket
Luke ‘Sparrow’ Gillian has followed the Australian Test team across the globe for 25 years, becoming a cherished presence around the team. In the Lord’s Long Room this week he raised his bat - and flag - on an epic milestone.
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Standing in the Long Room at Lord’s, wearing a floral print jacket so loud it would have woken all the staid old types in the paintings on the walls surrounding him, Luke Gillian couldn’t believe where he was.
Gillian, or “Sparrow” as so many past and present Australian cricketers know him, is that guy cricket watchers would be well aware of too.
He’s the colourful shirt wearing, flag and cricket bat waving superfan who supports the Test team around the world.
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His Lord’s visit was to mark his 200th Test, an astonishing feat of attendance which began in the West Indies in 1995, during which Gillian became a pseudo drinks carrier for the players during a tour match at St Kitts, where his mate Dave also fielded for an over, under the guise of being Tim May.
After that encounter Gillian was welcomed in to the fold and started a relationship with Australian cricketers past and present.
It’s relationship that he’s needed now more than ever too, one that has carried him through some dark times.
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Gillian only just made it Lord’s. Bankrupt and living in his car in London until just recently, his larger than life presence and his colourful wardrobe belied the darkness than was engulfing his life.
If it wasn’t for the urgings of the Australian team manager Gavin Dovey, and demands from Test great Steve Waugh and current coach Justin Langer that Gillian get to Lord’s, the 49-year-old said he might not been around to celebrate it.
“People look at my life and go ‘marvellous’, and it has been,” Gillian said in front of the famous member’s pavilion this week.
“It has also been terrible of late, through no-one’s fault but my own. No matter how thin you slice the bread, there is always two sides.”
Gillian’s tale is one to be envious of in so many ways.
After that West Indies tour in 1995, and the embrace he felt from the playing group, who had never enjoyed such strong Australian support on overseas tours, Gillian got the bug.
“That’s when you could walk through the player’s hotel and knock on their door,” he said.
“After the tour game, they got us match tickets for the next game. It manifested itself on to Jamaica, and from that moment it was ‘what’s next’.
“We went to the World Cup in Pakistan, South Africa 1997, the Ashes in 2001, and it just rolled through, that connection was still there with the boys.
“You could turn up to any training session, just take a seat. The boys would say ‘good to see you again Lukey’. A couple of other mates started travelling with me really, there were four or five.”
That turned in to 247 in 2004. Gillian, having begun hosting actual groups as part of his “wave the flag” tours after people began contact him, took a huge horde to India.
“When I first started, all I wanted to do was go on my own. I wanted to go and live the Caribbean way of following the game,” he said.
“It wasn’t until New Zealand in 2000, and it was just the four or five of us still, and we looked up in the crowd and there was Merv Hughes with his 25 in the tour group.
“I thought there had to be another way of encouraging people to watch the game. So I put together some ad hoc, rudimentary tours, started waving the flag, and saying ‘here’s the guesthouse, here’s your match ticket’ and nothing more.
“It was never a commercially oriented exercise, it was just getting people to the game, because people didn’t know how to do it on their own.”
Gillian’s presence in stadiums from Mumbai to Cape Town became a constant for the Australian players too. As the names changed, “Sparrow” was always there, waving his Australian flag, and his own bat, wearing the floral shirts that didn’t stand out as much as his unmistakeable voice.
The post-match fun was just as good, and Gillian can reel off the litany of bars he’s been through every cricket playing nation like he was in them last night.
But his desire to do good for his fellow cricket lovers was where it all started to go wrong.
He bought $500,000 worth of tour packages for the 2015 Ashes, and couldn’t sell them.
Financial strife was the root cause of a plague of other problems that beset Australian cricket’s superfan, and every flag wave after that was an effort, not a joy.
“I kept going. I was still there, still getting 40 guys to New Zealand,” he said.
“I got to Sri Lanka in 2016. We had 15 days of cricket, and I couldn’t wait to get home. I lost it, the heart had gone.
“But I knew there were 100 guys who had been travelling with me for 15 years, so I went.”
Gillian had been to 150 Tests in 15 years. But it took him nearly a decade to get to 200.
That he arrived was a victory in itself, and a mark which could, he hopes, be the catalyst for him getting to even more.
“To be in the Long Room at Lord’s with the boys, to receive an embroidered shirt, with all the signatures on it, that’s priceless, and a reminder that I’ve been around the world with them,” he said.
“We all go through phases in life … when you just don’t want to.
“But we go to Bangladesh again next year. It’s not much, two Tests, but it’s something to look forward to.”