Runs, records, rage: Hookes' one for the books

Andrew Sincock's defining memory of that mythologised Monday afternoon on October 25, 1982, remains as vivid as it is edifying.

Fatigued from more than eight hours in the field and aching after bowling 18 overs of his right-arm seamers on a mercilessly flat final-day Adelaide Oval pitch, Sincock was relieved at the prospect of shedding his bowling boots and resting his feet through an inconsequential final session.

The fact Victoria captain Graham Yallop – Sincock's sole wicket in Victoria's soporific 9-420, to which Yallop contributed 151 in almost six hours – had effectively killed the game by setting South Australia 272 to win from 31 overs surely meant stumps would be drawn prematurely.

But as Sincock, who would go on to coach SA and at the fabled Adelaide-based cricket academy, was dragging himself towards the white picket players' gate he caught sight of his captain David Hookes sprinting towards the dressing room.

"David's as angry as you like, and he ran past Rick (Darling, SA's Test-capped opener) and said 'hurry up and put your effing pads on, we're going out there'," Sincock recalled of the moment Hookes revealed he had promoted himself to be Darling's opening partner.

"He then rushed up into the rooms, and by the time the rest of us bowlers got there, he was getting even angrier.

"He's throwing his pads on in a fury, saying 'I'm going to do this and do that', whatever it was he was planning to do to Victoria which included a lot of swearing.

"And then he went out there and did it."

It was that raw, unbridled anger that fuelled the 43 minutes of carnage that followed, as Hookes thrashed what remains the fastest authentic (not gifted by declaration bowling) century in first-class cricket history.

And while cricket.com.au has confirmed Hookes's extraordinary milestone arrived off 35 balls rather than 34 as widely and popularly claimed, that innings from the 1982-83 Sheffield Shield season remains the stuff of folklore for the thousands who claim to have witnessed it live, and others who relived it through a special subsequent telecast.

The rage that Hookes carried, along with his heavy Gray Nicolls scoop bat, to the centre of Adelaide Oval at 4pm that afternoon was born from previous Victoria clashes at the venue over preceding years.

In the final match of 1979-80, SA captain Ian Chappell's team (of which Hookes was a member) needed only a draw against Victoria at home to claim the Shield ahead of their bitter rivals.

But as Victoria and Australia all-rounder Shaun Graf recalls, the crowds that flocked to Adelaide Oval on the last day with the home team 1-90 at lunch needing 244 for victory were left stunned as leg spinner Jim Higgs (6-57) and Graf (3-50) knocked the hosts over for 160 to lift the trophy.

"We won from where we shouldn't have," Graf told cricket.com.au.

"We were walking all over the wicket on that final day, trying to make it jump and spin and whatever."

Two seasons later, after SA had slumped to the ladder bottom following Chappell's retirement, Hookes was installed as skipper for 1981-82 and led his team into the summer's final game against Victoria at Adelaide Oval where they again needed an outright victory to win the Shield.

Once more, around 8,000 fans streamed to the ground as Victoria lost eight wickets on the final day and SA were set 161 from 44 overs for the prize, duly cruising home with nine wickets and 15 overs to spare.

So Yallop – who didn't play in that game, but had been reinstated as skipper for 1982-83 – was understandably reluctant to set any sort of realistic last-day target, lest the hordes descend once more.

"We had copped it the previous year," said Graf, who was part of the Victoria line-up in all three of those matches.

"They're not the friendliest crowd around."

Both teams had also undergone significant changes in personnel since the previous summer.

SA fielded a new-look new-ball attack with Test quick Rodney Hogg fit having missed 12 months with a back injury, and the addition of West Indies giant Joel Garner who would snare a remarkable 55 wickets at 17.75 from his eight appearances for SA.

Victoria, in the midst of a tumultuous few years that yielded three consecutive Shield wooden spoons, were without young guns Dean Jones and Merv Hughes who had debuted in the preceding season and blooded 23-year-old seam-bowling all-rounder Peter King.

Amid more regular events, it would be King's contribution that history remembers given he remains the only player in the competition's 130-year history to score 50-plus (he made 54) and take five wickets (5-88) in the maiden innings of a Shield debut.

He also remembers the sole piece of advice he was given prior to the SA game, in which he shared the new ball with Rod McCurdy.

"The only instruction I remember receiving was 'whatever you do, don't bowl short to Rick Darling' because he was such a destructive puller and cutter," King told cricket.com.au.

"So of course I did, and I got him out – he tried to hook, and it went up in the air and he got caught – and he was my first wicket.

"I was thinking the game was pretty good after both teams' first innings."

There was also early indications of tensions, with Yallop hurling his cap when umpires Tony Crafter and Bruce Martin decreed it was too dark for Victoria to begin bowling at SA after being dismissed for 260 late on day one.

McCurdy would have been unable to take the new ball had play resumed, given he was nursing an ice pack on his right shoulder having been hit by a Garner bouncer while batting at number 10.

Victoria's frustration deepened when Hookes was dropped on 13 by Peter Cox at second slip next day, before plundering 137 from 163 balls in SA's first innings and imparting wisdom to reporters that seems a cruel taunt with the context of hindsight.

"When you are chasing runs you have to be more careful early," Hookes said, with SA bowled out for 409 early on day three before Yallop (104no) guided his team to 2-202 by stumps.

The SA skipper's annoyance then began to fester throughout day four as Brad Green (70 off 161 balls) and Cox (47 off 110) followed Yallop's lead to squeeze the life out of the contest.

"Hook was clearly shitty at Yallop because they would have expected a declaration around drinks in the middle session of the last day, to set them about 220 which would have been the standard," Graf recalled.

"But because we'd got done in the previous match there was a bit of scarring, and also the wicket was flat with the boundary on the members' stand side about 45 metres or something ridiculous, so Wally (Yallop) was pretty worried hence the reason for the late declaration.

"I think Hookesy and Wally got on okay being Test teammates, but they were totally different types of characters."

As Darling recalls, he and Hookes had opened together "a few times" in club cricket, but never at state level and he wasn't privy to any pre-innings chat from his captain on what the game plan would be for the final session.

"There was no discussion, there was no plan, but it was quite obvious what was going to happen," Darling told cricket.com.au.

"Just by his attitude and his decision to put himself up into the opener's role, it was fairly self-explanatory.

"From memory, Yallop and him had a few words prior to the innings starting but Hookesy used to clash with most opposition batsmen.

"He was very much along the same lines as Ian Chappell.

"Chappell would strut out, full of confidence and antagonise everybody just by taking his time, or having a dig at someone, or pulling away as the bowler was running in.

"That used to get Ian's adrenaline pumping, and Hookesy was always moulding himself on Ian right from the very start.

"He learned from the master when it came to antagonising opposition."

Despite the change in the batting order with Hookes replacing Darling's then opening partner Kim Harris, there was no initial indication of the frenzy to follow.

McCurdy, who had jokingly swung a punch at Hookes when playing a one-dayer for Tasmania two years earlier and who would eventually relocate to Adelaide to play for SA and Hookes and Darling's grade club West Torrens, conceded just two singles from his opening over.

Then King took the ball from the River Torrens end, and all hell broke loose.

The debutant's opening delivery landed marginally short of a length, and Hookes rocked back and smacked it over the near boundary fence at mid-wicket.

King responded by bowling wide of off-stump and Hookes let the next one pass, before helping a stray leg-side delivery to fine leg, crashing a full ball outside off through cover and pulling a short ball over middle stump behind square leg for a brace of boundaries.

"I think I started off with three slips and two gullies, and by the end of my first over there was one slip left," King recalled.

"From there, Wally (Yallop) started to spread fielders all over the place.

"He (Hookes) was hitting balls that were almost landing in the blockhole, and he was crunching them all over the place – it was incredible.

"There was one delivery – I'm not sure if it was in my first or second over – where I bowled to him and you could just hear the ball go 'bang' on to the roof of the old members' stand."

Footage of the innings, from back in the era when Channel Nine in Adelaide regularly televised live the final session of Shield matches, indicates that 'bang' came from the fourth ball of King's second (and final) over.

By that stage, the shellshocked rookie's figures read 0-38 from 12 deliveries, with his more senior opening partner conceding 17 from his second over and the scoreboard showing SA 0-58 with Hookes 53 and the usually free-scoring Darling three from eight balls faced.

"We didn't discuss anything out in the centre … I thought it best to keep away from him," said Darling, whose upcoming collection of cricket stories 'Bush to Buckingham Palace' is scheduled for release next month.

"As it turned out, my role – and I didn't know this until after the second over - was to just push for a single and let him have a go.

"People used to say I was an aggressive batsman, and maybe I was with my hooks and pulls and cuts, but my aggression was more running between wickets than anything, and running between wickets wasn't going to win it for us.

"That would come from Hookesy's hitting, so my role was simply to give him as much strike as possible."

If conversation between the two batters was non-existent, there was at least some anxious chatter being exchanged among the Victorians who were suddenly fearful of history repeating.

Graf, in his 20th Shield match having played 11 one-dayers for Australia, remembers watching the near-new ball land atop the members grandstand roof and thinking "okay, this is going to be interesting".

He also realised he was next in the firing line when King was spelled after two overs.

"Because I'd played a couple of one-dayers for Australia at that stage, Wally came to me for the sixth over and said 'righto Porno', whattaya reckon?'," Graf recalled.

"He was already starting to really worry, and he's come to me as if I'm the old pro.

"So I said 'all right, I'll bowl wide of off stump and we'll pack the off-side field to protect the long boundary and we'll see how that goes – that was plan B.

"So then I went for 19 off my first over and Yallop's now beside himself, and when he came up to me again I said 'well you better start thinking about plan C if you've got one'."

After six overs, SA were 0-94 with Hookes 83 (off 25 balls faced, strewn with 15 fours and three sixes) and despite the level of malevolence he harboured, most of those boundaries had come via pure cricket shots rather than wild slogging.

Although there was one stroke – from the final ball of McCurdy's second over – where he cleared his front leg and carved a length delivery through point with a ferocity that still bemuses Graf who was fielding on the fence awaiting his turn at the bowling crease.

"I was at deep point and I wouldn't have had to move more than two or three metres to cut it off, and couldn't get there," Graf said.

"It just smashed into the fence.

"He was just in such ridiculous nick and played some amazing shots."

From his silent vantage point at the non-striker's end, Darling was left to marvel at his captain's unerring eye and freakish placement but also felt his panicking rivals had played into Hookes's hands.

"They didn't bowl well to him," he said.

"They fed his strengths, which was not short outside off but with fullish balls, and when there was any width that was just cream on the cake for Hookesy.

"He plonked his front foot, nowhere near the pitch of the ball as it suggests in the coaching manuals, and unleashed slashing cover drives through point, cover and extra cover.

"And then anything that drifted onto leg or middle, he would hoick it over mid-wicket.

"I don't think Hookesy had a vast array of shots, but the ones he did have were incredibly effective.

"And what he also had going for him was that big, heavy bat he used, and he only really had to lean on the ball and away it would go to the boundary."

With Hookes in a murderous mood and the run rate above 15 per over – well beyond the almost nine SA needed for the most preposterous of wins – the Victorians' anxiety swelled further as hundreds of spectators began running into the ground upon hearing news of what was unfolding.

Word hadn't spread via TV as Nine had opted for traditional after-school programming that Monday (the Channel Niners and Scooby Doo), but ABC radio listeners received updates from expert commentator Les Favell, who had been Chappell's inspiration as an aggressive skipper in his SA playing days.

As the grassed hill began to fill and office workers perched on the concrete tiers in front of the Vic Richardson Gates, King gained a quick appreciation of what his teammates had endured in summers not long past.

"I remember blokes standing on the hill underneath the scoreboard yelling out 'bring back King'," he recalls with a laugh.

"I get reminded about it often enough, and if everyone who says they were there was actually in attendance, there must have been a crowd of about 100,000."

Given public access to Shield cricket was free after tea, there is no official attendance figure though anecdotal reports suggest it swelled from several hundred to around 4,000 in less than half an hour.

Whatever the number, Hookes began playing to them in more than stroke making and when McCurdy spent around two minutes undoing and re-tying his boot laces, the SA skipper theatrically hurled his bat to the turf and demonstrably complained to umpire Crafter and then at Yallop.

Whether the delay had an impact on his concentration remains unknown given Hookes's premature passing in 2004, but he was lucky not to have been adjudged lbw on 99 before posting his historic hundred with a flick behind square leg off a McCurdy no-ball later in that over.

As holder of the official scorers' running sheet from the day, Fox Cricket statistician Lawrie Colliver re-scored SA's innings for cricket.com.au and determined the milestone arrived from 35 balls faced, with Hookes scoring off 28 of them with 18 boundaries and three sixes.

"That's the fastest century I've ever seen, and I've only been watching cricket since 1919," former Australia and Victoria batter Len Darling (no relation to Rick) said in television commentary.

"I've never seen anything like it in my life."

SA had reached 1-122 after nine overs with Darling caught behind off McCurdy for 11 singles in an opening stand of 122 (Hookes was 103), but as the adrenaline subsided and tiredness took hold, the hometown hero hit just one more boundary from the final eight deliveries he faced.

In attempting to lift McCurdy over long-off, Hookes holed out for 107 (off 40 deliveries) and the Victorians collectively exhaled in relief until – through the bodies in the members area who stood united in prolonged ovation – they saw Garner descending the stairs to bat at four.

"Hookesy went out, and we thought 'well thank goodness for that, everything should go quiet now'," King recalled.

"Then Joel Garner walked in and hit his first ball straight back down the ground – that long boundary at Adelaide Oval – for a six that didn’t get more than about 10 feet off the ground for its whole journey.

"And we just looked at each other and went 'my God … here we go again'."

But Garner came and went for 19, and when the promotion of similar pinch-hitters Kevin Wright and Chris Harms failed to maintain the momentum Hookes had built, and regular top-order players Rob Zadow and Harris were dismissed cheaply, the brazen victory bid seemed set to backfire.

SA suddenly found themselves 7-204 and needing to survive seven overs with only renowned stonewallers John Inverarity and Andrew Hilditch standing between Victoria's reinvigorated bowlers and card-carrying tailenders Hogg and Sincock.

However, the visitors' time-wasting tactics came back to haunt them as the umpires again called bad light and the game ended in the draw that had seemed its destiny an hour or so earlier.

Graf claims Victoria "were right in it" at that stage, and would have been favourites to steal an unlikely (and perhaps undeserved) win if light had allowed.

Hilditch doesn't remember SA being suddenly gripped by a fear of losing, but nor does he remember being at the crease with Hookes's captaincy predecessor Inverarity at the end.

"I don't recall that, and I'm pretty sure anyone who was there doesn't remember that part of the day either," Hilditch told cricket.com.au

While other details of the game also disappeared into time's mists, Hookes's innings became legend particularly in Adelaide where anyone with more than a passing interest in cricket claims to have witnessed it in person, or via the subsequent television coverage.

Even though it was first aired as a 30-minute highlights package on Nine Adelaide at 11.45pm that night, such was the clamour to see it again the knock was reputedly replayed on Christmas Day 1982 in the interests of state pride.

And it is perhaps because of those edited highlights that Hookes's hundred – as with all worthwhile legends – carries a whiff of mystery.

The official scorers run sheet, as re-scored by Colliver, shows a 35-ball century as did the match report that ran on the front page of Adelaide's 'The Advertiser' the morning after the match.

However, the highlights package that purports to show every ball Hookes faced contains only 34 deliveries, which likely gave rise to records still carried by numerous cricket statistics sites.

The missing 'mystery' delivery is one of the two dot balls Hookes played out prior to reaching his hundred in McCurdy's fifth over.

The only surviving edit of the highlights, put together by Nine for a tribute show in the wake of Hookes' untimely death in 2004 and published on cricket.com.au today, also shows him acknowledging a century with NSW keeper Greg Dyer applauding in the background.

Dyer didn't start playing for NSW until 1984, and the only milestone score Hookes made against NSW with Dyer in the side was the 243 he posted in 1986.

Regardless of whether it came off 34 or 35 balls, Hookes's effort remains the fastest authentic century for deliveries faced, with the quickest according to the clock – Percy Fender's 35-minute whirlwind for Surrey against Northamptonshire in 1920 – believed to have taken 40-46 balls.

Hookes conceded at day's end the catalyst for his rampage was anger.

"I was upset at the way Yallop had captained the side for the past two days," he told reporters.

He also claimed that, taking into account the sequence of five hundreds from six Shield innings that vaulted him into Australia's team for the 1977 Centenary Test against England, he felt he had never hit the ball better than he did that afternoon against Victoria.

And in his 1993 autobiography 'Hookesy', he disclosed that among the cracking cover drives and hefty heaves over mid-wicket, his favourite strokes from that sublime session were a pair of delicate leg glances off McCurdy.

"He (McCurdy) had shifted his fine leg fieldsman quite square to cut off the pull or hook shot, and I moved across outside off stump to glance the next two balls to the fine leg boundary – and knew immediately I couldn't be in better touch," Hookes wrote.

The animosity that built across four days was salved when the rival teams gathered in SA's rooms for post-match drinks, another tradition Hookes readily adopted from Chappell.

But the impact and impressions of that frenetic 43 minutes lingered for years, and in some cases for decades.

Most immediately, Victoria selector and administrator Bill Jacobs decided Hookes was the man his state needed to arrest its decline and the South Australian was offered the role of captain-coach the following season, which he eventually declined although Yallop had relinquished the leadership.

For Darling, whose initial reflection was whether his contribution of six in a century opening stand was some sort of bizarre benchmark, it represented an insight as to what cricket might have been like during SA's most compelling era.

"Just watching all those people flock down to the Oval, I imagine it was a bit like the Bradman era when people would be in central Adelaide at work and, upon hearing Bradman was batting, they would all stream down from the city," he said.

Graf, who as Victoria's long-serving director of cricket finally lured Hookes to the state coaching role in 2002, became a close friend of his former rival and admits it was "great to be part" of that remarkable game.

"The thing that remains most vivid for me is how hard he hit the ball, and the way he terrorised Yallop," Graf said.

"Every time he hit a four or a six, he glared straight at him and put it on him.

"And Yallop wasn't the hardest man around, so it certainly worked for Hookesy."

Sincock, who shakes his frosted mane as he described how his long-time teammate possessed "more talent in his little finger than the rest of had in our bodies", is taken back to a secret he's nursed for decades.

"I only ever played against David twice because we were usually in the same team at club and state level," he said.

"But in pre-season trial games I used to bowl at his stumps and he would come up to me and say 'don't you tell anybody', and I'd say 'tell them what?'.

"And he reckoned 'nobody bowls at me like that, everybody angles the ball across me thinking I'll go after it and nick one, but there's a chance I'll be 100 or more when I do'.

"Then he'd say 'but you start bowling across me and curve it back in, and I bloody well miss it – nobody else ever bowls to me like that'."

As for King – who went on to coach Manly in Sydney's Premier Cricket as well as serve a term as Melbourne Cricket Club president – he was dropped one match after his wildly fluctuating debut, but did win a recall for a further four Shield matches more than two years later.

Among them was a Shield game against SA at Adelaide Oval, where his return of 2-90 off 29 overs in Victoria's only bowling innings included the wicket of Hookes for 25.

"I gave him a send-off then – it was a couple of seasons too late, but I got him out which was quite funny," King laughs.

"But for all that happened, it's a great memory and I was lucky to be there.

"Facing Joel Garner, and Hoggy was just an incredible experience, getting 50-odd with the bat was pretty good and Don Bradman was at that game and I met him, which was a bit of a thrill.

"Hookesy's innings was the best I'd ever participated in, for sure, and possibly the best I've seen.

"There was a lot of anger in it; not a lot of craftmanship, it was out and out brutality.

"I'd never seen anything like that before. I've actually got the DVD of the whole innings … I don't watch it often."