Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Nash can't live down Garry Sobers' six sixes



It has been 40 years when Garry Sobers whacked Englishman Malcolm Nash for six sixes in an over but Nash says he is still being asked about the six balls he bowled that day at the St Helen's Ground in Swansea.
"I reckon I get asked about it if not once a week then at least once a month," Nash was quoted as saying in Daily Telegraph on Sunday, the anniversary of the feat. "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."
Nash, 63 shifted base to San Francisco in 1998 but is still widely known as Sobers' victim . However unfairly, given the fact he in 1968 he was barely two years into his Glamorgan career and from thereon he went on to take 993 first-class wickets. Nash was also an integral member of Glamorgan's championship-winning side the next year
He now works for Vespro Inc, a firm that recycles plastic products, in marketing and sales.
"It feels like it was two days ago, because it is talked about over and over again," he said.. "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. It was the first time I had played against Sobers in a first-class match, and I wanted his wicket.
"I had him 'caught' off the fifth ball, but the only really bad ball I bowled was the last one. I tried to bowl a medium-paced seamer up in the blockhole. But I didn't change my run-up and that was a real mistake. It was a half-tracker and he whacked it out of the ground. It was the first ball I bowled all day that deserved to be hit for six."
Nash's humiliation was completed by the action of BBC producer John Norman, who was told by the Grandstand office to stop filming at tea. But Norman, who died this summer, kept the cameras rolling because BBC Wales wanted to practise filming cricket. "Fifteen minutes after it was all over, the producer, who had told us to stand down, rang back and begged me not to spill the beans," Norman said years later.

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