Today in History
The afternoon Sobers sent six balls out of St Helen's
At St Helen's in Swansea, the sea is never very far away. Neither, in 1968, were the surrounding streets, terraces and buildings, an inconvenient arrangement whenever Garry Sobers decided that the boundary rope was merely advisory.
The television cameras almost missed him. A BBC Wales crew was at the ground partly for training, and its scheduled transmission had ended. The producer nevertheless asked the cameramen to continue. A relay technician elsewhere in Wales was persuaded not to take his scheduled break. Through this chain of small decisions, five minutes of grainy black-and-white film survived.
There was little warning that those five minutes would matter. Nottinghamshire were batting deep into the first day of their County Championship match against Glamorgan and looking towards a declaration. Sobers, their captain, had reached 40. At the other end was Malcolm Nash, a talented left-arm seamer who had lately been experimenting with quick orthodox spin in the style of Derek Underwood.
The experiment had not been foolish. Nash had already taken four wickets. It was about to become spectacularly ill-fated.
A bowler still trying to take wickets
Nash was no obliging trundler placed in the story to make Sobers look grander. He had helped Glamorgan defeat the touring Australians only three weeks earlier and would take 993 first-class wickets in a 17-year career. When Glamorgan won the County Championship undefeated in 1969, Nash led them with 71 wickets at under 19 runs apiece.
He was also an attacking bowler. Nottinghamshire wanted quick runs, Glamorgan wanted wickets, and Nash saw no point in abandoning the contest merely because the batsman was Sobers. Asked years later why he did not fire the ball harmlessly down the leg side once the assault began, he gave the answer of a proper bowler: "You don't get people out unless you bowl straight and you attack them."
The first ball went over long-on. The second disappeared over deep square leg. Nash pushed the third a little wider, and Sobers drove it over long-off into the pavilion enclosure. The fourth was shorter and was pulled over backward square leg.
Four balls, four sixes. Now everyone understood what was possible.
The fifth delivery produced the afternoon's one hesitation. Sobers lofted it towards long-off, where Roger Davis completed the catch while moving backwards. Davis could not stop himself, however, and carried the ball over the boundary. Under a regulation introduced at the beginning of the 1968 season, a fielder had to remain within the playing area for the catch to count. A year earlier Sobers would have been out. In 1968 the umpires conferred and raised both arms.
Nash changed tack for the sixth ball and returned to seam. It came out as a short one. Sobers sent it high over midwicket and beyond the East Terrace.
Wilf Wooller's commentary rose with it: "And he's done it! He's done it!"
Sobers had become the first batsman in first-class cricket to strike six sixes from a six-ball over.
Six blows, and then the match continued
The over took Sobers from 40 to 76. He remained unbeaten on that score when Nottinghamshire declared at 394 for five. Glamorgan were then bowled out twice, and Nottinghamshire won by 166 runs.
That result mattered to Sobers. His later recollections were notably free of self-congratulation. He said the team had been seeking quick runs before the declaration and that he had not thought seriously about the record until the fifth six. The famous over was not a circus act detached from the match. It was an extreme version of the job his team had asked him to do.
The film ensured that later generations did not have to rely entirely on adjectives. Sobers looks balanced rather than brutal. The bat comes through freely. Nothing about him appears hurried, even as balls vanish in several directions. Long before power-hitting became a specialist occupation, the game's most complete all-rounder made 36 from an over without looking as if he had borrowed somebody else's technique.
Ravi Shastri became the next batsman to hit six sixes in a first-class over, for Bombay against Baroda in January 1985. By then limited-overs cricket was established and the idea of calculated boundary-hitting was less alien. Sobers had done it more than sixteen years earlier with a comparatively narrow bat, at a seaside county ground, while preparing a declaration.
There was an appropriately cricketish afterlife. A ball said to have been used in the over was sold at auction for £26,400 in 2006. Nash insisted it could not be genuine because it was a Dukes ball, while Glamorgan had used a Stuart Surridge ball throughout the over. Footage and teammate testimony supported him. Even one of cricket's most famous balls, it seems, could become a wrong 'un.
Nash never escaped the six deliveries, but neither was he ruined by them. He remained proud that he had attacked. Sobers went on producing greater innings and more complete performances for the West Indies, yet the little strip of film from Swansea came to stand for something his statistics could not quite hold. It showed the freedom of his cricket, and the sense that ordinary restrictions applied to him only when he found them useful.
History nearly missed the whole thing. Somebody at the BBC delayed a break, Nash kept bowling at the stumps, and Sobers supplied the rest.