Thirty-six from one over, eighteen at the end

India were 155 for three in the seventeenth over at Durban, already well ahead of a good score. Yuvraj Singh came in at number five with three overs left.

He faced sixteen balls in the match. Ten of them went for four or six.

Three fours and seven sixes, which is 54 of his 58 runs. He ran four.

The nineteenth over

Stuart Broad was twenty-one and playing his fourth Twenty20 international. Every account of what followed begins with an exchange between Yuvraj and Andrew Flintoff in the previous over, though what was said is reported differently by everyone who has told it.

Broad bowled six balls. Yuvraj hit all six of them for six.

Over long-on. Over backward square. Over extra cover. Over midwicket. Over long-off. The last one went over point and out of the ground.

Thirty-six from an over. His fifty came from twelve deliveries, the fastest in international cricket, and he finished 58 from 16 with a strike rate of 362.50.

Broad's figures were 4–0–60–0.

Full scorecard: England v India, World Twenty20, Kingsmead, 19 September 2007 →

The arithmetic

India made 218 for four. England replied with 200 for six, which in 2007 would have won almost any other Twenty20 international ever played.

Nobody in their top seven failed. Maddy 29, Solanki 43, Pietersen 39, Collingwood 28, Shah 21, Wright 16, Flintoff 8 not out. Five of them passed twenty and their opening stand was 53 inside six overs. It was a competent, unhurried chase of an impossible total.

India won by 18 runs.

Take the over out and India make 182. England, chasing 183 rather than 219, would have won with an over to spare. Very few individual passages of play can be shown on the card to have reversed a result on their own. This one can, without argument. The margin of victory was exactly half the size of the over.

Six different directions

Long-on, backward square, extra cover, midwicket, long-off, point. Six deliveries and six separate parts of the boundary.

That is the detail which makes the over hard to write off as one bad plan repeated. A bowler who keeps missing the same length gets hit to the same place. Broad was hit everywhere, which means either that he changed his mind five times or that it had stopped mattering what he bowled.

What preceded it

The over is remembered alone, which flatters it. Virender Sehwag made 68 from 52 and Gautam Gambhir 58 from 41, and their opening stand was 136 in fourteen overs. India were already winning when Yuvraj walked out.

He was out in the last over, caught by Paul Collingwood off Flintoff, for 58. The scorecard records the fourth wicket falling at 216 and no other trace of what had happened.

How new the format was

This was the fortieth Twenty20 international ever played. Three of the twenty-two men on the field that night were making their debuts in the format, one of whom was Chris Tremlett and another Rohit Sharma.

Nobody had settled on what a par score was. Nobody had worked out where to bowl at the death. Broad was twenty-one, in his fourth match in a format four months old at international level, being asked to bowl the nineteenth over of an innings that had already produced 182.

The bowler

Broad has said, repeatedly and unprompted over the twenty years since, that the over made him the bowler he became. He went on to take more than six hundred Test wickets and to produce, at Trent Bridge in 2015, the best spell by a fast bowler in Ashes history.

That is a generous reading of the worst night of a young man's career and it may well be true. It is also the only account anyone has of what those six deliveries were meant to be, because the one other person qualified to explain them was busy hitting them into the stands.

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No. 3 in The Over That Turned It, a series of 3.

TomorrowTwo wickets in an over, two runs at the end