WOOLDRIDGE: Ted Dexter's glorious innings: Lord's 1963

He struck 70 runs off 74 deliveries but even those startling statistics tell next to nothing.

It was the manner of their making that transformed his deeds into the dream of all schoolboys and the fireside romance of old men.

For me the second Test and the earth seemingly stood still as he played one of the truly great innings of our time.

He simply stood and smashed anything that Hall and Griffith could hurl at him.

The faster they bowled the more savagely he cut and drove and pulled them. This was Dexter, the enigma of even his own generation, rising head and shoulders above all his contemporaries.

Only once he smiled and that was when he thrashed Griffith through the covers to reach his 50.

His bat flashed through like a scimitar and the crack was like a British rifle sending death down into some deep, echoing gorge along the North West Frontier.

He held his bat at the highest point of that followthrough and waved it to acknowledge the ovation.

Even that was not his greatest shot. There was another, hit from a later ball that Griffith flung out of a sea of faces from the unsightscreened Pavilion End, that almost defeated description. Dexter picked it up late in its flight.

There was hardly time for any backlift so he simply jabbed it. Quite how he could generate such power with only wrists and forearms to strike it so hard in front of the wicket no one will ever know.

But Butcher, at deep extra cover, literally could not move more than a foot before it was past him and scorching into the boundary boards.

Griffith was hurling the ball into the wicket to get it to rear chest-high. Even that could not slow the cascade of runs. Dexter dragged one down so fast on the leg side that McMorris never saw it.

It struck him on the leg and he fell poleaxed. Dexter spared only a cursory glance at the first aid administrations.

He prowled round and round his stumps with the tense stifflegged walk that hints at monstrous impatience.

He never rests on his bat at these times: he holds it either deep down the handle at the trail or across his chest, cradling it in the crook of his left arm.

Dexter was once an infantry subaltern and it seems that these attitudes might well have been learned from the Small Arms Manual. He treats his bat like a tommy-gun.

McMorris, recovered, retreated to cover for the next over from Sobers. But there was no hiding place.

Dexter smashed his next shot straight at his toecaps and McMorris, understandably, wanted to have no dealings with it.

He stooped tardily and gingerly but the ball was through him and away to the boundary again before he had to commit himself to more pain.

Hall and Griffith, the most volatile fast bowling attack in the world, had no idea where to bowl next at him. Hall was hit for 23 off two overs after lunch, Griffith was no-balled seven times in his first nine overs.

Dexter had hit his first 50 off 51 balls and Barrington, like the Sergeant- Major he is, was intent only on giving his captain the strike. The crowd roared with approval every time he took a single, for Dexter's innings was now no matter for petty partisanship.

Edward Ralph Dexter was out there in a domain where no critic could touch him. This was his thundering answer.

But shortly after three o' clock there was a fatal stay in proceedings.

Griffith had been hammered out of the firing line and Sobers came down to the Pavilion End to bowl his seamers. His first over was an impeccable maiden to Barrington and its effect on Dexter was profound.

The rhythm of England's crashing counter-offensive had been lost.

In Sobers' next over Dexter shuffled forward, bat slightly askew. It was his first indecisive movement in 80 minutes at the wicket and it was his last.

He missed the ball as it swung at him and struck his pad. There was to be no reprieve for the guerilla leader. Umpire Buller's finger went up and an innings that thousands will treasure for the rest of their days was over.

Dexter walked away briskly, like a man with other urgent business to attend to. All along the Nursery balconies, down the length of the ground and across the three tiers of the pavilion there was a sudden upward movement as though Lord's itself had risen two feet off its foundations.

It was an illusionary effect for it was nothing more than every man, woman and child, coloured and white, standing to applaud him each yard of the way back to the pavilion.

Anyone who did not feel some tiny tingle down the spine must have been soulless or very, very cynical.