Graham Napier came within one blow of breaking one of cricket’s all-time batting records as he struck a remarkable 16 sixes in Essex’s first innings in their Championship match against Surrey at Whitgift School on May 19.
Remarkably, the Essex man was playing his first Championship innings for eleven months after successfully recovering from a spinal stress fracture and he showed his well-being by making a career-best 196.
This was also the second time that Napier had struck 16 sixes in an innings, having achieved the feat in a remarkable 152 not out from just 58 balls in a Twenty20 Cup contest against Sussex at Chelmsford.
Napier’s six-hitting tally at Whitgift School equalled the first-class record held by Andrew Symonds who in August 1995 struck 16 sixes in Gloucestershire’s first innings against Glamorgan at the delightful Avenue Road ground in Abergavenny – widely regarded to have been one of the most picturesque grounds on the county circuit with Glamorgan taking first-class cricket to the Monmouthshire market town during the 1980s and 1990s.
Nestling among tree-topped hills on the Welsh border, a mile or so from the town centre, the tranquil setting for Symonds’ feats could not have been more different than the surroundings at the Croydon ground where Napier struck his 16 sixes amid the bricks and mortar, plus the bustling traffic, of suburban south London.
Abergavenny’s quaint pavilion and irregular boundary also provided a timely reminder of cricket’s rural roots in the pre-commercial era, and it was in this idyllic setting that Andrew Symonds, then an Anglo-Australian, hit the headlines with his batting feats during his season with the West Country side while he decided whether to qualify for either England or Australia.
The four-day game began with Glamorgan posting 334 with three batsmen scoring half-centuries, but it then exploded into life on the second day as Symonds blasted an unbeaten 197 with a dozen sixes as Gloucestershire reached 373 for 7 by the close.
Half a dozen of his sixes came against spinner Neil Kendrick, who sixteen years later was present at Croydon to witness Napier’s salvo as the former Glamorgan and Surrey cricketer is now teaching and coaching at Whitgift School.
Returning to events of 1995, Symonds’s sixes continued the following morning and just before noon he despatched the usually economical Steve Watkin high back over his head and over the boundary at the Pen-y-pound End for his record-breaking 16th six – beating the previous record held by New Zealander John Reid, who struck 15 in his innings for Wellington against Northern Districts in 1962-63.
The ball struck by Symonds eventually came to rest on a tennis court some 20 feet beyond the tree-lined boundary, but it proved to be the final six of his innings as Gloucestershire were shortly afterwards dismissed for 461 leaving Symonds undefeated on 254 having also struck 22 fours in his dramatic 206-ball innings.
But this was not the end of Symonds’s six-hitting in the contest as during the second innings he struck four more to take his match tally to 20, breaking the previous first-class record of 17 struck by Warwickshire’s Jim Stewart against Lancashire in 1959.
The contest at Abergavenny ended in a draw, but almost unnoticed Indian fast bowler Javagal Srinath completed a superb match return of 13 for 150, with his supreme efforts with the ball – on a ground widely regarded as a bowler’s graveyard – in keeping with the almost surreal atmosphere generated by one of county cricket’s most idiosyncratic, and charming, of venues.
Similarly, the game at Whitgift School this summer also produced an oddity; a match aggregate of 1443 runs yet in the Surrey first innings Mark Ramprakash – one of the most prolific batsmen in recent times on the county circuit – completed a twelve-ball duck.
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