The match
itself was an unremarkable late-season contest. Nottinghamshire, captained by
Sobers, met Glamorgan in a fixture that, in Championship terms, promised
little. Yet sport’s alchemy lies in its unpredictability: the mundane suddenly
mutating into the immortal. Nottinghamshire sought quick runs for a
declaration, Sobers sought a case of champagne to settle a wager, and a young
bowler, Malcolm Nash, sought merely to experiment. Out of this triviality,
history was made.
The
Stage and the Players
Nash, 23,
had made his living as a seamer, but was persuaded to try his hand at left-arm
spin in the pursuit of averages and variety. Against any ordinary batsman, it
might have been an eccentric but harmless experiment. Against Sobers, it became
the stuff of cruel irony. The setting too lent itself to drama: St Helen’s,
with its short leg-side boundary for left-handers, and a Saturday crowd
increasingly attuned to the sense that something unusual was unfolding.
Tony Lewis, Glamorgan’s captain, recalled the moment Nash was asked to continue. “Leave him to me,” Nash said with stoic resolve—words that, in hindsight, echo like a tragic line of Greek drama.
The
Orchestration of Violence
The
sequence unfolded with an eerie inevitability. The first ball soared over
midwicket, out of the ground. The second landed in the stands. The third,
lofted cleanly over long-on, was an act of power rather than grace, Sobers
lifting his right leg in the follow-through as if to punctuate the brutality.
By the
fourth stroke—pulled savagely over backward square—the crowd themselves were
possessed by the vision, chanting “six, six, six” in anticipation. Sobers, too,
began to entertain the thought of perfection.
The fifth
offered a twist of uncertainty. Roger Davis, stationed at long-off, clutched
the ball but tumbled beyond the boundary. Confusion reigned. Sobers himself
turned for the pavilion, only to be recalled when the umpires confirmed the
inevitable: another six.
Then, for
the final act, Nash attempted a quicker, shorter delivery. Sobers, now “seeing
it like a football,” as he later recalled, dispatched it mercilessly over
midwicket, the ball disappearing down King Edward Road as if eager to flee the
scene of its own destruction. Returned the next day by a schoolboy, that ball
now rests in Nottingham’s Trent Bridge museum—an object transformed into relic.
Commentary,
Irony, and Aftermath
The BBC’s
Wilf Wooller, himself a Glamorgan patriarch, fumbled through the live
commentary, too moved and astonished to provide coherent words. Even the act of
recording history faltered before the spectacle itself.
For Nash,
the episode became both curse and companion. He would go on to take nearly a
thousand first-class wickets, yet his name is tethered forever to that one
over. “It wasn’t that bad an over,” he later mused with remarkable composure.
“I bowled one really bad ball—the last.” His resilience was as remarkable as
Sobers’ genius; he laughed at his fate, played golf with Sobers in retirement,
and accepted the selective memory of cricketing folklore: “That moment is, of
course, all to do with Garry Sobers, and not much to do with me.”
Yet irony
followed him still. In 1977, Frank Hayes took 34 off one of Nash’s overs at the
very same ground. Cricket, in its cruel symmetry, seemed to insist on binding
bowler and place together in eternal mischief.
The
Legacy
At the
time, the record for most runs in an over was 32, shared by Clive Inman and
Cyril Smart. Sobers’ six sixes did not merely surpass that—it created a new
language for cricket’s imagination. It demonstrated that perfection was
possible, however briefly, and that the sport, often bound by patience and
attrition, could also explode into pure audacity.
For
cricket, Sobers’ feat was not just a statistical milestone but a work of art:
an over in which time slowed, inevitability crystallised, and a game became a
fable. To recall it is to recall not only six strokes of genius, but the
theatre of chance, personality, and irony that surrounded them. Sobers authored
the moment, Nash embodied its cost, and together they gave cricket one of its
eternal stories.
Thank You
Faisal Caesar
