Sunday is the 57th anniversary of Sir Garfield Sobers hitting six sixes in an over – and the last day that a cricket match will be played at St Helen’s in Swansea.
Cricket is always more festive, less dour or attritional, at a seaside ground and Sobers was in festive mood on the last day of August in 1968. Nottinghamshire, a county that had atrophied before the immediate registration of overseas players in 1968, were looking to hit out against Glamorgan and declare. Sobers, as their captain, hit out like no batsman before.
We can still savour the footage and feline grace of the most gifted of all cricketers. Of the first five sixes, off the left-arm spin of Malcolm Nash from round the wicket, Sobers pulls three leg side and straight-drives two. In these T20 days the second of them would have been swallowed by long-off, Roger Davis, but he falls back over the boundary.
Sobers was thinking that Nash would revert to his normal medium-pace for the final ball – in order to avoid immortal notoriety – and pitch it shorter. He coiled up like a leopard, aimed leg side and the ball disappeared down one of the terraced streets outside St Helen’s. Sobers declared; human perfection, of a kind, had been achieved.
Glamorgan have played first-team matches at the extraordinary number of 19 grounds but St Helen’s has hosted more of their first-class games than any other, 416. Yet Sunday will host the last cricket match there, after 150 years, when Swansea’s second XI play Pontardawe. Only one ground where England have played an international match has closed to cricket – Sheffield’s Bramall Lane, which staged an Ashes Test in 1902 and a Victory Test in 1945 – so St Helen’s will be the second.
Back in 1973, when one-day international cricket was beginning to take off, England took on New Zealand at St Helen’s. It was England’s fifth ODI and only the sixth worldwide. Different times – to the extent that when England chased a target of 159, Sir Geoffrey Boycott scored 20 off 88 balls, Dennis Amiss 100 off 121.
Swansea CC will move to a ground in Sketty while memories of famous contests at St Helen’s fade. It is the terracing which makes the ground a seaside amphitheatre, with the beach across the road. “St Helen’s has an atmosphere all its own,” Wisden declared at the end of the 1968 season. “It is infectious and all-embracing. It also inspires the players.” Glamorgan won the second of their three county championships the next season.
I attended the passing of Bramall Lane in 1973, although I did not dig up the turf at the end of the game as spectators were invited to do.
Earlier this week, I was picked to play at St Helen’s against Wales over-70s for Gloucestershire over-70s. The ground was built on a sandbank and by the start time of 1pm the outfield had dried after the overnight storms, but the square was sodden. “It’s the first rain we’ve had for months,” said Swansea’s secretary Chris Hamilton-Smith, looking out at the parched field.
I climbed the damp steps of terracing to the dressing-rooms: the away team is always given the smaller one. A decent chance I could have shared the same peg as Sir Garfield. Many of the old photographs in the pavilion are of rugby players, as Wales played 51 internationals here, with a crowd of 50,000 in 1930. The last game of rugby at St Helen’s, for the time being, was played in April. The Ospreys have been given permission by the council to renovate St Helen’s as a rugby stadium, but Welsh rugby and money are not synonymous; no sign of any diggers moving in next week.
A bracing wind came off Swansea Bay, from west to east, so that Sobers would have been hitting downwind. It had dried the outfield but the square remained soaked. I bowled a ball, off the square, and it turned, so the ground’s reputation as the place for spinners must be true.
At tea on the third and final day, the touring South Africans were 54 without loss, needing 148 for victory, back in 1951. They had already beaten Glamorgan at Cardiff, by an innings, so no shock was on the cards here. The difference was that St Helen’s was packed with a crowd of 25,000 – and these spectators made things happen.
Glamorgan had three briskish off-spinners, just the type for a ground on a sandbank. The South Africans lost all 10 wickets for 29 runs in less than an hour. Wilf Wooller – then Glamorgan’s captain, later the BBC commentator when Sobers hit his sixes, and a some-time Telegraph correspondent – was carried on shoulders from the field. Land of my Fathers was sung, and it was the only county game the South Africans lost on their whole tour.
Glamorgan beat the 1964 Australians here by 36 runs “amid tumultuous scenes by an excited and jubilant Welsh crowd” so Wisden recorded. “As soon as they reached the ground and saw the pitch they [the Australians] sensed it would be susceptible to spin.” You guess it might have resembled a photograph of the beach. “A crowd of 20,000 saw Glamorgan consolidate their advantage in a tense atmosphere one usually associates with a Welsh Rugby International.”
When they beat the Australians on their following tour in 1968 by 79 runs, again at St Helen’s, Glamorgan became the first county to defeat them on two consecutive tours. Again the home side’s recipe was spin bowling and close catching. “We held the catches that mattered,” said Glamorgan’s captain Tony Lewis, later to be the cricket and rugby correspondents of The Sunday Telegraph, “and it made the winning difference.”
In 1985 Matthew Maynard scored a dazzling century here on his Glamorgan debut – and I seem to remember him hitting Yorkshire’s spinners into the sea. Maynard could have been England’s Harry Brook had he batted in a less conformist era.
Glamorgan’s last game here was a one-dayer against Derbyshire in 2019. According to Hamilton-Smith, the ball was hit out of the ground 27 times – and the county did not want the expense of putting up netting, so that was it.
I took a last stroll around St Helen’s. At a stadium in Cardiff, Welsh Fire have been collecting the wooden spoon in the Hundred, both men and women. Had they played here, and picked a local finger-spinner or two, in front of a passionate crowd, there might have been signs of Welshness and fire. |  |
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