In a tour match at Edgbaston in 1932, CK Nayudu hit a six which cleared the perimeter of the ground and landed in the River Rea. While certainly an impressive feat, was this really “hitting it into the next county”, as it is commonly referred to? Michael Jones investigates.
“Trying to hit it into the next county” is a phrase beloved of commentators and journalists, to be used any time a batsman takes a massive swing at the ball – so it naturally piques the curiosity of a trivia fan to think that anyone may have literally achieved such a feat, all the more so when the player in question is not a modern-day hitter wielding a bludgeon of a bat, but one from a previous era.
The match in question was between Warwickshire and the Indian touring team of 1932; on the third day the tourists were staring defeat in the face at 92/7, only 19 runs ahead, before CK Nayudu and Nariman Marshall added 216 for the eighth wicket, enabling them to declare and the match to meander to a draw. It was during this partnership that, it is claimed, Nayudu hit the ball from Warwickshire into Worcestershire
The original scorebook of the match, preserved in the Edgbaston archive (if that is not too grand a description for a cupboard under one of the stands), confirms that Nayudu hit six sixes in his innings of 162, and all the newspapers which reported on it agree that one of them cleared the embankment in the direction of the River Rea, which runs close to the ground. Most state that it landed in the river rather than reaching the opposite bank on the full, although the Rea is so narrow at that point that the difference is only a metre or two. It is beyond reasonable dispute, then, that Nayudu did make such a hit; the question is, did it cross a county boundary in the process?
Investigation
While rivers tend to stick to approximately the same course over time – give or take a movement of a few metres due to erosion – boundaries between administrative areas are a political construct, and move according to the will of the politicians of the day. Let us examine, via a little of the history of the area, how they have changed in this case. Birmingham, like most cities, was originally a small settlement, which grew over the centuries to absorb the surrounding towns and villages until they became suburbs of it. A bridge over the Rea, a mile or so north (downstream) from the ground, bears the inscription “Near this river crossing an Anglian tribe led by Beorma founded Birmingham”, along with the origin of the city’s name – Beorma ingas ham, meaning “the home of the people of Beorma”.
A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 7, the City of Birmingham, digitised by British History Online, traces its growth. Edgbaston, although it had long been part of Warwickshire, remained separate from Birmingham until 1838, when the town’s royal charter (it was not until 1889 that it was officially granted city status) defined its area to be that of the parliamentary borough, which included the parish of Edgbaston. The district of Balsall Heath, immediately to the east of Edgbaston, remained part of Worcestershire. A map illustrating the changes over the city’s history is not sufficiently detailed to show exactly where the boundary ran, but it is quite likely that it was the river, since such natural boundaries are often used to save having to define a separate political one; even today many national borders follow rivers for part or all of their distance (the Rhine between France and Germany, and the Mekong between Laos and Thailand, are just two examples). So if a boundary had to be drawn between two districts, and there was a river in the area, it is probable that the river would have been used as the boundary.
At that point, then, a hit from one bank of the river to the other would indeed have landed in the next county – but there was no opportunity to make such a hit, because there was not yet a cricket ground on the site. That came in 1885, when the county boundaries remained the same as they had been 47 years earlier, but it was not long before they changed again. In 1891 Balsall Heath was made part of Birmingham, and thus also part of Warwickshire, moving the boundary with Worcestershire to the opposite side of that district; in 1911, the adjacent districts of Yardley (to the east of Balsall Heath) and King’s Norton (to the south) were also added to Birmingham, shifting the boundaries even further. Only in the short interval from 1885 to 1891 would it have been possible to hit a ball into the next county, and there is no record of anyone doing so in that period; by the time of Nayudu’s hit in 1932, the nearest point in Worcestershire was three miles away. He could legitimately claim to have hit the ball into the next parish, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “next county”.
Nevertheless, the story of “the hit into the next county” has been retold ever since. I was myself guilty of perpetuating the misconception: in an article for ESPNCricinfo in 2012 dealing with various urban legends in cricket, I debunked others but stated that the Nayudu story was true. My error was to check only that he had made the hit over (or into) the river, which he had; it did not occur to me to question whether that had indeed formed the county boundary at the time. It was only by chance that I discovered the mistake, years after writing the original article: browsing a local library, I happened to come across a map of Birmingham dated 1936, four years after Nayudu’s innings, looked at the Edgbaston area – and found no county boundary anywhere near it, prompting me to research the history of the boundary changes.
Is it possible?
If Nayudu did not achieve the feat, is it possible at all? At First-Class level, with county boundaries as they are today, the answer is no (although there is always a chance that a future generation of politicians may decide to change the boundaries again): none of the grounds which either actually hosted one or more county matches in 2020, or were scheduled to host matches which were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is close enough to another county for such a hit to be feasible. There are probably a few club grounds at which there is at least a possibility it could be accomplished – one of them thanks to another boundary change in the 1970s.
The cities of Birmingham and Coventry, along with the rural area of Meriden Gap in between them – all of which had previously been in Warwickshire – were made into the new county of West Midlands, redefining the old county to include only the smaller towns and villages. The Edgbaston ground itself is technically no longer in Warwickshire, but the traditional counties continue to be used for cricketing purposes. The line at which the city of Coventry meets the district of Kenilworth, which had never previously been a county boundary, thus became one. This boundary runs down the middle of Gibbet Hill Road on the southwestern edge of the city, a road which also separates the main part of the University of Warwick campus from its sports pitches. The nearest pitch is directly adjacent to the road, leaving the tantalising prospect that a batsman may be able to hit a ball from Warwickshire into the West Midlands.
However, there is disappointing news for any trivia fan hoping to see the feat accomplished – a series of obstacles serve to stack the odds against it. Even if the exact county boundary is assumed to be the centre line of the road, so to reach the next county it is sufficient for the ball to land in the further half rather than having to clear the road completely, the shortest distance from the near crease to any point in the next county is around 135m.
Research by Charles Davis on the longest verified hits (as opposed to the exaggerated claims commonly made by fans of particular players, or commentators getting carried away in the heat of the moment) found that the record is approximately that distance, although naturally all the greatest distances have been recorded by professionals practised in the science of big hitting, mostly in either international matches or franchise T20 leagues – the chance that club standard players in inter-university tournaments could emulate their feats is as good as zero. A further difficulty is that the pitch is perpendicular to the road, so in order for a 135m hit to land in the next county it would have to go directly behind the batsman (a straight drive from the other end would have to be struck 155m, which is impossible). The biggest hits tend to be made in an arc roughly between mid-on and square-leg, because a backlift towards the slips, resulting in a swing to leg, generates the maximum amount of power; the scoop shot may be a useful way of directing the ball to an area where, prior to the advent of T20, most captains would never have considered putting a fielder, but it is certainly not going to yield any records for big hits. No player could even come close to hitting a ball 135m behind him.
What if we consider a hit which initially lands in the same county, but bounces or rolls into the next one? Unfortunately (for the cricket trivia fan, if not for the driver) there is little chance of that happening either: as an extra precaution against any encounter between cricket balls and traffic – although the distance makes it hardly necessary - a thick hedge and row of trees line that side of the ground. A ball travelling within two metres or so of ground level would have no chance of penetrating the hedge, while one higher would have to be precisely placed to find one of the few gaps in the tree line. For the foreseeable future, then, “hitting it into the next county” will remain solely a figure of speech.