Longest Six in Cricket History: Shahid Afridi's Disputed 153m Claim, Ranked

Shahid Afridi’s six off Ryan McLaren at the Wanderers in Johannesburg on March 17, 2013 is the hit most widely cited as the longest six in cricket history, reported anywhere from 153 to 160 metres depending on the source. It is also the most disputed: ESPNcricinfo’s own Cricket Monthly remeasured the shot against Google Earth and stadium maps and concluded the ball likely traveled no more than 100–120 metres, calling anything beyond 130 metres “out of the question.” That gap between legend and geometry runs through almost every entry on this list — this is the full, fact-checked chronology of the longest-six claim across 170 years of cricket, not just the current leaderboard (for that, see our biggest sixes in cricket ranking).

How This List Is Ranked

Unlike a standard longest sixes leaderboard built purely from 21st-century broadcast data, this list tracks every claim that has, at some point, been described as the biggest six ever hit — including 19th- and early-20th-century shots with no video evidence at all. Entries are ordered by the distance most commonly claimed for them, but every figure is paired with the best independent estimate where one exists, and claims resting on eyewitness memory alone are labeled as such rather than presented as fact. Nothing here is an official record; cricket has never had a governing body that certifies six distances.

The Longest Six Claims in Cricket History: Full List

The Claims Worth Scrutinizing

Afridi’s 2013 hit anchors this whole conversation because it’s the number every highlight reel repeats, but it’s built on the shakiest ground. The Cricket Monthly’s mapping exercise placed the ball’s landing point roughly 100 horizontal metres from the bat, with 120 metres possible if the shot had flown unimpeded — nowhere near 153m, let alone 160m. Thin air at the Wanderers’ 1,700-metre altitude likely did help the ball carry, which is probably why a genuinely huge hit happened there at all, even if the attached number is inflated.

Brett Lee’s Gabba six holds up better. Multiple broadcast reviews land in the 130–135 metre range rather than the higher 143m sometimes quoted, and Lee was using a carbon-fibre-reinforced bat later banned by the ICC — a detail that adds nuance without erasing that it’s still one of the two or three longest hits with any real evidence behind it.

Further back, C.K. Nayudu’s 1932 six at Edgbaston is one of history’s better-attested giant hits: contemporary newspaper reports and the original scorebook agree a shot cleared the ground toward the River Rea, the boundary between Warwickshire and Worcestershire, giving rise to the famous line that he “hit it into the next county.” Victor Trumper’s 1903 blow at Redfern Oval is even more concretely documented — the ball broke a second-storey shop window across the street, and the pane was reportedly left unrepaired for over 60 years in his honour, letting historians triangulate distance from the building’s location on old maps.

Why Pre-2000s Claims Are Especially Unreliable

Nothing before the broadcast-graphics era comes with camera-tracked data. Distances for Fellows (1856), C.I. Thornton (1876), and Peter Heine (1955) rely entirely on eyewitness accounts, some recorded well after the fact, at grounds that in Heine’s case no longer exist to measure against. Cricket historian Gerald Brodribb, who spent decades cataloguing these claims, concluded several — including Thornton’s — were inflated for the same reason old fish stories grow with each telling: no one could check them. Even Doug Walters’ 140m SCG six from 1962 muddies “distance,” since the figure appears to include roll after the ball hit the ground and ran down a slope toward the lake, not pure carry.

2026 Status: Has Anyone Broken the Record?

No. Afridi’s disputed 153–160m figure and Brett Lee’s better-supported 130–135m both remain unchallenged more than a decade later. Tim David’s 129-metre six for Australia against India in Hobart in November 2025 is the largest credibly broadcast-tracked hit of the past two seasons — good enough to rank among history’s biggest measured shots, but still short of Lee’s mark and nowhere near Afridi’s claimed number. Modern bats and power-hitting training keep producing huge sixes in volume, but no one has yet produced a shot with enough camera evidence behind it to unseat even the more conservative entries on this list.

Longest Six vs. Biggest Six: Two Different SportsMonkie Lists

This page and our biggest sixes in cricket ranking cover overlapping territory on purpose, but they answer different questions. This one asks “what’s the longest six ever claimed, and how much of that claim is real?” — tracing the record back to 19th-century folklore. The companion piece asks “what’s the current, cross-verified leaderboard of the biggest broadcast-era hits?” and focuses on 2000s–2020s cricket with a tighter evidence bar. For the raw volume of sixes rather than single-shot distance, see most sixes in international cricket and most sixes in T20Is.