Spirit of the age
incentives, empowered by everheavier bats. In an 85-ball 102 in the 1975 World Cup final at Lord’s, Clive Lloyd deployed a 3lb Duncan Fearnley to hit Dennis Lillee into the top tier of the Tavern Stand and flail Max Walker into the Grand Stand. In the final against England four years later, Viv Richards used a humpbacked Stuart Surridge Jumbo to hit the last ball of his undefeated 138, a nearyorker from Mike Hendrick, into the Mound Stand. Seeing mid-off and mid-on back, he anticipated a full delivery, stepped to off and aimed to leg. “I left the field thinking: ‘That shot is my invention’,” he wrote in
“It wasn’t arrogance. It was pure one-day cricket.” It was also pure Richards: he hit six sixes in his record-breaking 56-ball Test hundred in Antigua in April 1986, including one, off John Emburey, with one hand.
In the same week, fastidious premeditation informed perhaps the most reverberating six of all. Footage of Javed Miandad awaiting the last ball of the Austral-Asia Cup final in Sharjah shows him standing a full minute, scanning the field and calling on his deity, with four needed to win. Like Richards at Lord’s, he anticipated the pitched-up delivery, nailing a full toss from India’s luckless Chetan Sharma into the stands. It remains the maximum of maximums: the luxury Mercedes Miandad was given, and the umrah he was enabled to perform at the Holy Kaaba in Mecca, are a unique temporal and spiritual double. Thus, perhaps, the beginnings of cricket’s genuflection to the six, which suited the priorities of a game increasingly preoccupied with television. The slow-motion replay broke it down for delectation; the umpire’s ceremonial raise of the arms provided an interlude of celebration; the commentator revelled in descriptive possibilities. A first generation of sponsors also embraced the big blow.
Some have raised alarms about the spirit of this age, and in December 2016 MCC’s world cricket committee recommended a limit on the dimensions of the modern bat, a miracle of balance, mass and rebound. Yet the rise and rise of the six is not just about power. It is also about time, urgency, gratification. It took Darren Lehmann 30 first-class hundreds over a decade to secure a Test cap. It took his son, Jake, one ball – sliced inside-out for six to win a BBL game for Adelaide Strikers in January 2016 – to become an instant celebrity. He did not even seem to hit it that well: the ball fell just the right side of an alluring rope.
But perhaps that is another dimension of the phenomenon. The hit for six has been less the characteristic shot of the last decade than the mis-hit. Certainly, the days when six implied perfect connection, complete mastery, are past. So excellent are bats, so conducive are conditions and so lush are incentives, that it hardly matters how – it is how much. Size matters. As Gayle is also bound to have said at some point.