As former Ravi Shastri’s six-sixes-in-an-over feat off Baroda’s Tilak Raj turns 40 tomorrow, there is a lesson for today’s domestic cricket shirkers—Ranji cricket can make you accomplished too
Ravi Shastri hits out in a domestic cricket match (right) Baroda’s Tilak Raj. PICS/MID-DAY ARCHIVES
One of the things that came up in the aftermath of India’s 1-3 loss to Australia in the 2024-25 Border-Gavaskar Trophy series was the non-participation of the big guns in domestic red-ball cricket.
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Rohit Sharma last figured in a Ranji Trophy game in November 2015, when Mumbai clashed with Uttar Pradesh at the Wankhede Stadium. Virat Kohli’s last Ranji Trophy game was the Delhi v Uttar Pradesh tie at Ghaziabad in November 2012. That is one season before Sachin Tendulkar played his last Ranji Trophy game for Mumbai.
The above two mentions provide damning evidence of how little importance the national championship holds for star players and the establishment.
There was a time when Ranji Trophy games used to be held in between Test series and that did not stop the India regulars from featuring in them. A week’s gap between the conclusion of the 1984-85 India v England Kolkata Test and the next Test at Chennai afforded an opportunity for the Mumbai players in the Indian team—skipper Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri—to be part of the January 8-10 Bombay v Baroda Ranji Trophy game at the Wankhede Stadium.
Dilip Vengsarkar would have been the third current India player in the Mumbai playing XI, but he reportedly reached the ground after skippers Gavaskar and Kiran More walked out to toss. In the previous game against Gujarat, Shastri and Raju Kulkarni found themselves out of Gavaskar’s playing XI when they reached late.
On the final day of the drawn game against Baroda, Shastri smashed an unbeaten double century—which included six sixes in an over off Baroda’s left-arm spinner Tilak Raj.
The first-class cricket feat meant Shastri joined Garry Sobers in the six sixes-in-an-over club. Sobers had done it in 1968 while playing for Nottinghamshire off Glamorgan’s Malcolm Nash at Swansea in the County Championships.
The six sixes took Shastri from 147 to 183—all those hits to the Garware End.
The feat got everyone excited—Shastri’s Bombay teammates, the small bunch of spectators and the press gang, who had a good close look at the audacious strokeplay at the pavilion end. In that press enclosure was Dicky Rutnagur, the Indian-born UK-based well-travelled writer, who had also witnessed Sobers’ 1968 feat.
At the players’ enclosure, Austin Coutinho, the well-known caricaturist, was watching the action as a Mumbai probable. The former fast bowler told me on Wednesday that he called the Mumbai players out of the dressing room after Shastri’s third strike, sensing something special was about to unfold. Coutinho felt the sixth six of the over was the best because, “Ravi created that six, hitting it from wide outside off stump over midwicket.”
Among the Baroda reserves was Mumbai-based Vijay Alva, the all-rounder, who was Shastri’s Bombay University teammate. “All his sixes were good except one, which could have been caught. It was a mix of power and excellent timing with that Symonds bat,” Alva, now a fitness guru, told me.
The six sixes were the icing on the cake for Shastri, who crossed several milestones during the game—going past his previous highest score of 161, crossing 3,500 runs in first-class cricket, reaching 50 wickets for Bombay in the Ranji Trophy and 200 scalps in first-class cricket.
His India teammate Mohinder Amarnath watched the innings too, since he had shifted to Baroda from Delhi for that season.
As for Tilak Raj, an India U-19 Test centurion in 1978-79, he was devastated to the point of refusing requests to be photographed with his slayer.
Shastri’s feat was splashed all over. Wisden of 1986 said: “That [six sixes in an over] gave him [Shastri] 12 sixes in his innings, an Indian record, and he hit one more to join CS Greenidge, GW Humpage and Majid Khan on 13. Only the former New Zealand captain, JR Reid, with 15, has hit more. Shastri’s double-hundred was also a world record, coming in 113 minutes off 123 balls.”
Shastri himself touched upon his feat in a column for Sportsworld magazine. “The match was heading towards a listless draw. Since it was a benefit match for the former Bombay medium-pace bowler Abdul Ismail, I decided that I would entertain the moderate crowd that was present,” wrote Shastri, going on to describe each six: “The first ball of the over was tossed up and I hit it over the mid-on boundary. The second was a rather similar delivery, this time on the leg stump. I gave the ball a good heave and it landed outside the boundary line between midwicket and mid-on. The third ball was pushed through quicker but I went down the track, hit it on the rise and the ball landed near the sight screen. To the fourth ball I moved down the track pre-determinedly. Tilak Raj had pitched the ball outside the leg stump and I took a good swing at it. I think my height helped me to reach it and it went soaring high into the stands at square leg. It was after the fourth six that I became aware of the record and how near I was to it.
I decided to go for it.
“The fifth delivery was fastish, pitching around middle and leg. I lifted the ball into the stands at mid-on. I knew now that I had to go all out; it was now or never. I was aware that Tilak Raj would try his hardest to contain me. I took a step outside the leg stump. Tilak Raj pitched it outside the off. The ball landed with a thud on the sight screen. I had done it!”
When Shastri got back to his Mahim apartment that evening, he played a prank on his mother who, earlier that day, had chided her son for coming home in the wee hours of the morning.
Lakshmi Shastri told me in an interview a few days before her son turned 50 in 2012: “I asked him what happened in the match and he just wouldn’t answer me. ‘Watch the 7.30 pm Marathi news,’ he said. Before that, I went to buy some groceries and a bhelpuri wallah told me that he had hit six sixes.”
Come to think of it, India’s answer to Sobers’ six sixes wouldn’t have taken place had it not been for the zeal of international cricketers to play domestic cricket. Lesson here.
mid-day’s group sports editor Clayton Murzello is a purist with an open stance. He tweets @ClaytonMurzello
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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