The normally phlegmatic Wilf Wooller hollered ‘He’s done it!’
No cricket ball had ever been as batted, battered and blasted as the one bowled to the great Garry Sobers one August day in 1968. That swashbuckling afternoon in Swansea, Sobers became the first player to strike six sixes in one first-class over of cricket.
Ten years earlier, batting for the West Indies against Pakistan, Sobers had scored 365 not out, a new record for an individual Test innings that stood until Brian Lara surpassed it in 1994. In 1964 Wisden elected Sobers their ‘Cricketer of the Year’, and in 1966 he scored 722 runs in five Tests against England, at an average of 103.14, also claiming twenty English wickets. He was – and remains – the greatest all-rounder in the history of cricket. Small wonder he was knighted in 1975 and crowned one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Century in 2000. Cricket will probably never see his like again, and though others have subsequently struck six sixes in an over, Sobers will be remembered as the first and the finest.
Sobers was playing for Nottinghamshire at the time, arriving at the crease with his customary ‘languid swagger… sleeves buttoned to wrists and collar turned up’. He batted stylishly but soberly early on in his innings as Notts reached 358 for five against Glamorgan. Then Sobers decided he should score some quick runs, set up a declaration and have a crack at the opposition. Having reached 40, he chose to launch his attack against Malcolm Nash.
Nash was actually a decent left-arm seamer who had already taken four Nottinghamshire wickets in the innings. ‘It was the first time I had played against Sobers in a first-class match, and I wanted his wicket,’ recalled Nash years later. ‘I was bowling orthodox slow left-arm spin, which I didn’t do all that often. I was just trying to get him out, simple as that. There was no point in bowling wide to him, because then I wouldn’t have got him out.’
Just as Nash ran up to deliver the first ball, the BBC Wales cameras at the St Helen’s Ground were told to stop filming – they had all the footage they required. But the head cameraman asked producer John Norman whether they could film one final over because he wanted his cameramen to practise their cricket coverage. Norman agreed and told commentator Wilf Wooller to remain at his post.
So the first ball of Nash’s over was captured on film, sailing over the Gorse Lane boundary as the left-handed Sobers pulled it for six. So too the second, landing in the stands, to the delight of the few dozen spectators. The third ball was smashed over the head of long-on and the fourth was dispatched over square leg, clattering into the terracing before bouncing back over the boundary rope.
‘The idea of going for the six sixes only came into my head when I had got four and I was going for five,’ reflected Sobers later. ‘I was not thinking about it at all before that.’
The normally phlegmatic Wilf Wooller hollered ‘He’s done it!’
Nash’s fifth ball pitched outside off stump, and Sobers sent it back over Nash’s head towards Roger Davis at deep long-on. Davis shuffled to his right, eyes fixed on the plummeting ball, and took a tumbling catch to the dismay of the locals. But in landing Davis had touched the boundary rope and the umpires signalled a six. Dismay turned to delight among the Swansea supporters, now so excited that their loyalty went the same way as Nash’s bowling,
One ball remained. Glamorgan captain Tony Lewis pushed his fielders back to the boundary. Nash decided he would ‘bowl a medium-paced seamer up in the blockhole’. Sobers steadied himself. The ball was on middle stump, but a fraction short, what Nash said later was ‘the first ball I bowled all day that deserved to be hit for six’.
And it was. Sobers struck the ball a thunderous blow, and it disappeared out of the ground as the normally phlegmatic Wilf Wooller hollered: ‘He’s done it, he’s done it. And my goodness it’s gone way down to Swansea.’ The ball was retrieved from a gutter in St Helen’s Avenue, adjacent to King Edward Road, by a startled seventeen-year-old schoolboy, who later returned it to Sobers.
Nottinghamshire immediately declared and in went Glamorgan to bat. Nash’s miserable match continued, as he was bowled for just 8 – by Sobers. Nash later emigrated to America, not to escape the embarrassment of his immortality but to help spread cricket Stateside. When he was tracked down by the Daily Telegraph in August 2008, on the fortieth anniversary of Sobers’ six sixes, Nash was living in California and only too happy to reminisce. ‘I reckon I get asked about it if not once a week then at least once a month,’ Nash told the paper. ‘It is never, ever far away or out of the limelight. I was just part of history and there was nothing I could do. It was just one over in my life. Would I take it back? Never. I just wish I got paid for it. It would have made me rich.’
The ball did make someone very rich. Having been presented to the Notts Supporters’ Association at Trent Bridge, in 2006 it was sold anonymously at auction for £26,400.