SYDNEY, Feb 4: Mark Boucher wanted Adam Gilchrist to extend his career by a year so the world’s top two Test wicket-keepers could have one final showdown on the field.

Australia are hosting a three-Test series against South Africa next season before a return series in South Africa and Boucher said he was disappointed Gilchrist would not be part of it.

Boucher will almost certainly reclaim the world Test wicket-keeping record from Gilchrist when he next plays a match and there will be no ongoing battle for the title as there was with Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan’s bowling mark.

Boucher is only 31 and therefore has plenty of time to put a significant gap between his final tally and Gilchrist’s record of 416 dismissals.

“I sent him a message to say how disappointed I was to hear that he was calling it a day because the last time I saw him I told him he’d better keep his incredible career going so that we could have one last showdown at the end of the year,” Boucher told the Daily Telegraph. “It was a big shock to hear he was going. But everyone knows how important his family is to him so I’m sure he made the right call. I’ll miss him a lot.

“If I think of the great innovators of my time, guys who revolutionized the game and made people see it in a different way, I’d say Jonty Rhodes and Adam Gilchrist would be top of the pile. Jonty changed the way people thought of fielding and Gilly has set the bar so high for the next generation of keeper-batsmen that it’s almost unfair.”

Boucher’s captain Graeme Smith said Gilchrist would always have his respect.

“The way he made an effort to contact Boucher when he broke the world record was typical of him,” Smith said. “We were in Pakistan and Australia were in India. It just wasn’t a question of dialling a local number.”—Agencies