Aneurin Donald hits 234 off 136 balls to equal record
GLAMORGAN’S victory was their first in a firstclass match since June last year.
That is reason enough for the county to celebrate, but there was only really one talking point from this game and that was the innings of Aneurin Donald, 19.
Donald walked to the crease in Glamorgan’s first innings with the score at 96-3 with his side having lost two wickets in the space of ten balls.
If the top-order failings that have plagued Glamorgan in Championship cricket were going to be avoided then he needed to consolidate.
As ever with Donald this would be done in an attacking way.
“I always try and be attacking or I don’t play particularly well,” Donald told The Cricket Paper. “The way it came out certainly wasn’t intended from the start. I played properly until I got my 100, hitting more normal cricket shots that you would see in red-ball cricket.
“It is a small ground with a quick outfield and I struck them quite nicely. And then I just sort of kicked on from there.”
While Donald says he played “properly” it is worth noting that his first Championship hundred was brought up from 80 balls. His “normal” is always quicker than what others would consider to be their base scoring rate.
From there came massacre. Donald brought up his hundred with a six and then struck 11 more maximums as he went from 100 to 200 in the space of 43 balls.
He hit 15 sixes in total as he reached the joint fastest first-class double hundred of all time, a record he now shares with Ravi Shastri.
It took him just 123 balls to reach his double ton.
“You just got the ultimate reward for your shots out there. Obviously it was a good wicket and they were trying to apply a bit of pressure so wasn’t the most defensive of fields. It all sort of snowballed really.
“I guess it is was a day, and a lot of sportsman talk about it, where I hit that zone and I didn’t really think about it too much.
“I didn’t intend to whack every ball out of the park until later on, I just tried to stick to my areas and if it was there I just tried to hit it as far as I could.
“Once I realised I was hitting it really well, and they kept the spinners on I just ended up trying to whack every ball just short of the 200, maybe at about 170.
“There were a couple of periods where we lost a couple of wickets and we weren’t miles ahead and I tried to rein myself in for a few balls, but I finally decided that it might be my day so I might as well try and cash it while I could.”
By the time Donald was dismissed for 234 from 136 balls there were nine Derbyshire fielders on the fence, but Donald was still trying to hit the ball over them – he reached 100, 150 and 200 with sixes.
If he had taken a step back he may well have made even more. The record score in first-class cricket for Glamorgan is an unbeaten 309 by Steve James, right, that was well in his sights, but Donald has no regrets about the way his wicket fell.
“By that stage it wasn’t where they were placed, it was whether I could hit it out of the ground or get a single along the floor and generally I was trying to beat them wherever I could.
“I don’t really know where it came from, but I was hitting them so well I thought I might as well change the game on the first day and try and put as far ahead as I could as quickly as I could.”
This win moves Glamorgan off the foot of the Championship table for the first time this season, they have Donald to thank for that.