DURING the over, recalls Malcolm Nash, the umpire Eddie Phillipson, told me to keep going but there was a lot of silence. I was taking a pasting and there weren't too many people rushing up to me and suggesting where I should put the ball.

"I wonder where Nash is going to bowl this one?" asked BBC Wales commentator Wilf Wooller.

"I just held the fifth ball back a bit," recalls Nash. "It was a little slower. That sounds silly because I wasn't bowling particularly quickly anyway but I just gave it a little more air and dropped it slightly shorter."

"Malcolm went a little wide of the off stump and this time I tried to hit it over mid-off," says Sobers. "Although I caught it well, I didn't middle it. I didn't get hold of it properly and it went towards long-off."

"I deceived Garry in the flight and he got under it," says Nash. "When I saw it going up, I thought to myself: 'that's it! We've got him! He's out!' And lo and behold, he was."

In fact, he was – and he wasn't. Out on the long-off boundary, Roger Davis suddenly found himself standing alone in the spotlight. As he started to re-adjust his position, the eyes of St Helen's were on him. Into his mind came the ball, as it hurtled towards him from Garry Sobers' bat, and, of course, the wall.

"And that will just carry," predicted Wooller in the BBC Wales commentary box. "No! He's going to be out!"

"It seemed to kind of move around in the air," Davis recalls. "It wasn't like when a ball is hit flat and it comes straight at you and you line it up so I was thrown a little. I wasn't sure whether it was going to come down quickly or float over my head. I caught it in front of me at chest height but I knew I was off balance because the force of the ball knocked me back a bit."

"Oh! He's dropped it – he's over the boundary!" exclaimed Wooller.

"You couldn't get a better catcher than Roger," recalls Brian Lewis, "and when he fell over I thought 'Oh Roger – what have you done? You could have made a better effort than that!' but I didn't realise how close he was to the line."

And as Davis lay on the ground for that split second, therein lay the problem – and ultimately the key to the legality of the six sixes. Where precisely had he landed? Nobody seemed to know, least of all the fielder himself. A more pressing question was immediately asked by everyone in the ground: was Sobers out? Again, nobody seemed to know – apart from a few players and Wilf Wooller. By this time, the man with the mike was in a bit of a tizz.

"Now where are my glasses?" he demanded. "Somebody's pinched my glasses. Let's have a look… Roger Davis caught it but he doesn't know whether he fell over the boundary or not. They're clarifying the position."

On the square, Sobers had set off on the long journey back to the pavilion. Having seen Davis catch the ball, he assumed his super-quick innings was over.

"I started to walk," he recalls. "I was quite willing to go – the six sixes thing didn't make any difference to me because if I was out, I was out and I was on my way.

"But then the crowd started shouting 'you're not out! you're not out! get back! get back!" So I did and waited for a little while."

In fact, it took nearly two minutes for the situation to be resolved.

"Six it is!" cried Wooller in the BBC Wales commentary box.

"Four on the trot!" he exclaimed. After pausing to recount, he tried again."Five on the trot!" and then just to make sure he had got it right, "five on the trot!

Six of the Best – Cricket's Most Famous Over by Grahame Lloyd Published by Celluloid Ltd and available from this week Price: £14.99