Cricket may have been pushed to the margins by the football World Cup, but it has refused to go quietly. Only 48 hours after an astonishing victory in the third Test at Old Trafford, Britain's dailies were once again forced to interrupt their blanket coverage of England-Brazil ... only this time by a humble county match. "Cricket mayhem as batsmen plunder 867 runs in a day," read the caption on the back page of the Daily Mail. "Records tumbled like autumn leaves," declared Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The Times. "One Al of a knock," shouted the Daily Star, under a banner announcing that "12 more pages of StarSport start with cricket" - surely a first for Britain's most football-orientated tabloid.

Alistair Brown, who had once again been ignored by the England selectors, replied with 268 runs from just 160 balls - an innings of "volcanic fury", according to Lawrence Booth in the Daily Telegraph. "Brown admitted that he had butterflies before he went out to bat, but spread his wings in the most glorious fashion imaginable."

But the mayhem did not end at Brown's innings. Glamorgan, chasing 439 for victory, got unfeasibly close, in "a bizarre match that might easily have been directed by Luis Bunuel and scripted by Chuck Jones," according to Rob Steen in The Guardian.

"Nothing could stop the bold Welsh advance on Surrey's apparently unassailable fortress of a total," enthused CMJ, though he himself accepted the need to "temper the tendency to hyperbolise".

"I would hesitate to call this the greatest one-day game, except in terms of runs scored," said CMJ. "It was a batting feast of extraordinary richness ... but 60-yard [boundaries], with modern bats on a pitch as true as this are, to the likes of Brown, like 180-yard par threes on a windless day to Tiger Woods."

Brown himself put it more simply: "I'm in the form of my life."

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd