Six obsession sums up the
n the rise of the Indian Premier League is symbolised by shots of seething crowds, comely cheerleaders and the flailing bat of Chris Gayle, while his voice sing-songs through the ecstatic din. “Because it’s a different feeling, I’m telling you, when you see so many flags going, and they are shouting your name, and saying ‘We want a six!’” As various of his strokes are seen soaring into stands, Gayle slips into a seeming trance. “It’s like, damn, OK, I’ll give them a six… Going, going, going, gone… Beautiful.”
Had there been a soundtrack, only Barry White would have been suitable: “Keep on doin’ it, right on/Right on doin’ it.” And, as ever with zeitgeisty Gayle, it was on point. The game has had rhapsodic romances with certain shots, from the cover drive and the leg glance to the reverse sweep and the ramp. Today, it is smitten with a quantity, a unit: the six has become the currency of cricket’s economy.
Contemplating the way the six collapsed distance between player and crowd, John Arlott once called it “the most companionable of cricket acts”. Today, it is in some ways a marketing device, an act of consumer outreach. As the camera hovers over the expectant terraces, we are invited to share in the rapture. Look at the fans! Look at them having fun! And look at the product we are pitching you!
Oddly enough, the most pronounced growth in the six supply has been experienced in neither Twenty20 nor Test cricket, but in one-day internationals. When Robin Smith (167 not out) set England’s one-day benchmark in 1993, they hit their four sixes in the full 55 overs. When Alex Hales (171) moved that benchmark last year, they hit 16 in 50. The four consecutive sixes with which West Indies’ Carlos Brathwaite lowered the boom on England in the World Twenty20 final a few months earlier still qualified as extraordinary, although not, perhaps, miraculous. No one had counted West Indies out, even though they needed 19 in the final over.
How and why has this changed? In the game’s earliest days, the scarcity of sixes was as notable as their abundance now. That was partly because six was awarded only if the ball left the ground itself, rather than simply the playing area. Australians awarded five runs for hits into the crowd, although this required the batsman to change ends – a penalty of sorts. Everywhere else, the hit beyond the ropes that remained within the ground was worth only four.
If the six has an ideological forefather, it was the broad-shouldered, horseshoe-moustached South Australian Joe Darling, who was irked on his first tour of England in 1896 to hit two balls over the pavilion at Crystal Palace and earn only four for them, as the venue’s defined precinct extended another 100 yards. To hit in these times was to indulge in an almost guilty pleasure. The notion that players were entertainers, had little traction. Even Gilbert Jessop, the definitive hitter of his day, felt no such duty: “Playing to the gallery in all sports is one of the most offensive forms of diseased vanity.”
The six was transgressive, not only because cricket was conservative. It was also risky. Bats were slim and light. Boundaries hugged fences. At lower levels, there was even the inhibition of six and out, lest a precious ball be lost. Six-hitting tended to be a facility of specialist practitioners, usually down the order: West Indies’ Learie Constantine, South Africa’s Jimmy Sinclair, Somerset’s Arthur Wellard. The pre-war batsman of stature most notable for hitting was an outsider. CK Nayudu was a straight hitter of withering force. A six out of Chepauk in December 1920 ended up near a coconut tree 50 yards beyond the ground. Six years later, 11 sixes in a two-hour 153 against MCC at Bombay Gymkhana advanced India’s case for Test recognition. And one of Nayudu’s 32 sixes on India’s 1932 tour of England, at Edgbaston, was said to have cleared the county, crossing the River Rea, which then formed the boundary between Warwickshire and Worcestershire.
If sixes grew more regular after the Second World War, one thing did not change: the conviction that they should be spontaneous. “It is unwise for a batsman specifically to make up his mind before the ball is bowled where he will hit it,” counselled Don Bradman. “The really fast scorer over a period is not the wild slogger.”
When Garfield Sobers hit his fabled six sixes at Swansea in 1968, he formed the ambition only after four deliveries: “I thought I should give it a go; there was nothing to lose.” The taboo was loosened at last by Sobers’s West Indian heirs, licensed by limited-over