WATCHING his reaction on old video footage – a regulation wave of the bat – it is almost as if he considers what he has just done to be insignificant. Yet Garry Sobers' modest acknowledgement masks one of the great achievements in world cricket – the first player to strike six sixes in a six-ball over of a first-class match.

It was the first day of Notts' late-season County Championship game with Glamorgan at St Helen's in Swansea and the visitors had progressed to 300 fairly comfortably.

But Sobers, captain in his first season with the club, decided he needed to step up the pace to set up a declaration.

Malcolm Nash had already taken four wickets with his seamers but decided to experiment with left-arm spin.

But Sobers just saw it as the chance to go on the assault.

What happened next was to immortalise the already legendary West Indian all-rounder and the bowler in equal measure.

"The six sixes is something that comes up every year since I did it in 1968, and that was 40 years ago now," said Sobers. " It never seems to die.

"It was just one of those things and the more important thing for me at the time was to get runs as quickly as we could so we could try to win the game."

Nash's first ball was viciously pulled out of the ground by the left-hander and the second received much the same treatment, landing in the stands.

A straighter third ball was thumped over the top of long on and by this time Glamorgan captain Tony Lewis was having a word with Nash and the crowd's excitement growing.

The next delivery saw Sobers aim his stroke over square leg and it had more than enough power to clear the boundary, bouncing off the terracing and back onto the field of play.

He said: "The idea of going for the six sixes only came into my head when I had got four and I was going for five, I was not thinking about it at all before that."

It was from the fifth ball that Sobers had a stroke of fortune. He failed to find the meat of the bat with a shot aimed over long off and Roger Davis, back-pedaling, stretched to take a catch.

But in doing so, the Glamorgan fielder fell back over the ropes and after the umpires consulted each other they awarded a fifth sixth.

Nash's sixth ball was the one he rates as the worst and Sobers was quickly in position to pull the ball over the ropes and out of the ground.

The ball landed on King's Road and was returned by a schoolboy.

"All I wanted to do was to get in a position where we could put Glamorgan in to bat again and that was the quickest way of doing it," said Sobers.

"It turned out that I did get all six and that was when it became one of the biggest things around."

The feat has since been repeated by Indian Ravi Shastri for Bombay in the 1980s. More recently, in international matches, Herschelle Gibbs of South Africa and India's Yuvaj Singh have also matched Sobers' effort – the latter from a Twenty20 over by unfortunate Notts' Stuart Broad.

But it is Sobers' accomplishment – as the first – that is best remembered.

"I know it means a lot because people are always reminding me of it and wanting to talk to me about it," he said.

"It was something that had never been done before and it was nice that I achieved it. But at the same time it was something that I wasn't going to jump and run about because of – records don't mean all that much to me.

"If records come along in trying to help your team then that's all well and good but they should not be an outstanding thing that dominates your thoughts."

The match itself saw Notts immediately declare and they went on to win the game by 166 runs – with Sobers bowling Nash in the Glamorgan first innings and then scoring 72 in his side's second innings.

Later, the two rival players became friends and met up to play golf together.

Before Sobers' knock, the greatest number of runs scored from one over had been 32 by Clive Inman for Leicestershire against Notts at Trent Bridge in 1965 and Cyril Smart for Glamorgan v Hampshire in 1932.

But the Barbadian's remarkable hitting can never be bettered – only matched.