It was “surreal” for an Australian club player to take six wickets in the last over of a one-day game over the weekend, which is a very rare event.
Surfers Paradise needed five runs to win and had six wickets in hand, so Mudgeeraba captain Gareth Morgan chose to bowl the last six balls himself. Mudgeeraba was almost certain to lose in the Gold Coast’s Premier League Division 3.
They fell apart dramatically when Morgan got rid of opener Jake Garland for 65 runs and then got rid of the next five hitters for golden ducks.
He told the Gold Coast Bulletin, “It’s funny, the umpire told me at the start of the over that I needed to get a hat-trick or something to win the game.” Morgan’s actions got national news.
“When it happened he just sort of looked at me.”
He also told ABC, a major news station, that it was “very strange.”
“I remember thinking after I got the hat-trick — I don’t want to lose this game now,” he stated.
“After that, things went crazy. I was shocked when I saw the stumps go back on the last ball; I had never seen anything like it before.
The first four outs were all caught, and the last two were bowled.
ABC reports that Neil Wagner of New Zealand (2011), Al-Amin Hossain of Bangladesh (2013), and Abhimanyu Mithun of India (2019) are the only players in professional cricket history to take five wickets in an over.