One bowler, two brutal assaults

One bowler, two brutal assaults

On August 31, 1968, Garfield Sobers created history when playing for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan at the St Helen’s ground in Swansea, plundered Malcolm Nash for six sixes in a six-ball over. It’s a piece of history that has been well documented that every cricket follower in the true sense of the word would be aware about. Nash, left-arm seamer, was experimenting with spin bowling on his captain’s instructions.

However, what is not so well know that nine years later the same bowler came within two runs of suffering a similar mortification! This happened on August 29, 1977, when Frank Hayes — he played in nine Tests and six ODIs between 1973 to 1976 — took 34 runs off Nash’s over. The scoring sequence being: 6, 4, 6, 6, 6, 6.

Incredibly, both assaults on Nash happened on the same ground. As he said later: “I never worry about the amount of stick I get, but the strange thing is it’s happened to me at different ends of the same ground!”