We tracked Daryl down at his ‘day job’ and asked about the game. It came as a bit of a surprise to Daryl that we didn’t proclaim to have seen it for ourselves. “You’d have thought there were 150,000 people there, the number of people who’ve said ‘I was there’. At the time I didn’t quite realise how big this was – these days I look back on it, and I guess I nearly got there”.
Gilmore was a product of Carlton’s Bendigo zone in the 1980’s and had played as a fast leading Full Forward for the Carlton reserves early in 1983. And then came the big chance. “I was working up here in Bendigo at the time, and my boss said to me ‘David Parkin’s on the phone for you’. So I answered it and I nearly fell over – it really was Parkin. He said ‘You’re in the team’. I drove down that night – I didn’t know much about it, they put me up in a motel. Here I was this kid from Bendigo in a big city like Melbourne. I didn’t know my way around!”
And so in Round 4, 1983, Gilmore ran out in Navy Blue. “It was against Melbourne, and I had barracked for Melbourne ever since I was a 3 year old. So my one and only game was against the team I barracked for! There were about 40,000 people there, and it was a drizzly old day. I never had screw-in boots, but Geoff Southby was there, and he said ‘I’ve got a spare pair here’ so I wore his boots in that game.”
“I’d been picked on the bench but on the day I was started at Full Forward. On the day I had 4 kicks, and kicked 3 goals 1. My first kick was a goal – Wow Jones got the ball and I led out to Centre Half Forward… I marked the ball and kicked it through. The rest is a bit of a blur – I think I goaled from my second kick, maybe my third, and definitely my fourth. I also got a couple of handballs’.
Contrary to standard practice these days, Gilmore spent most of his debut game on the field. “I only came off late in the last quarter, I’d actually hurt my big toe of all things. I was a bit frightened to tell anyone, really – such a small thing as a big toe. Parkin said to me ‘I’m really pleased, well done, now don’t go back to Bendigo and get a big head.’”
Gilmore did just that. He went back home, and returned on Tuesday of the following week for training. “Now we used to have full-on practice matches every Tuesday night back then. Ditchburn played well on that Tuesday night – he kicked about 8.” Perhaps in those days those practice matches were a leading indicator of selection? “I didn’t know I was dropped until I heard it on League teams on the radio. It was pretty hard to take.”
Gilmore found himself back in the Carlton reserves, despite being our equal top goal kicker the week before, along side Spiro Kourkoumelis. “It was my 4th game at Carlton when I’d cracked it for the seniors, so I kept on training, and played reserves for the rest of the year. I trained really hard the next year – I even got a trip to Hawaii for pre-season training camp out of it – and I was down for a month or so the next year. I just couldn’t get that next chance.”
The end to Gilmore’s chances of playing that next game came in the 1984 pre-season through the recruitment of Warren Ralph. Standing 190 cm and weighing in at 90 kg, Ralph was a quick-leading, safe-marking type with sensational goal sense. He was the WAFL’s top scorer three seasons in a row from 1981 to ’83, with scores of 127, 115 and 128 goals. “They had recruited Warren Ralph – which made it hard for me.”
Half way through 1984, Gilmore returned permanently to Bendigo. “It was a great experience – it was a life learning experience. It just would have been nice to play a bit more.” Gilmore’s record of 3 goals in his only game for Carlton is shared by only one other player in our history, a young man named Bill Flynn who achieved the feat in 1930.
In one sense, Gilmore returned to Bendigo somewhat empty-handed – a great Bendigo career, solid performances in Carlton’s reserves, and an impressive return from his one and only foray at VFL / AFL senior level, yet only the 1 game to his name. He returned to Bendigo empty-handed in another sense as well. “I came back to Bendigo without my jumper, the #40. Someone told me when you leave, you get your jumper. I ended up getting Scott Howell’s number, who moved from #40 to #12, or #10, and it was an old AVCO jumper. That jumper would be nice to have”.
Now, some 23 years later, it may be hard to find Gilmore’s #40 guernsey. But it would somehow seem fitting for the jumper to be returned to Daryl, if only to show it to the 150,000 people who proclaimed to have seen his 3 goals in the drizzle.