I might wish otherwise. But there’s nothing I can do about it.

I only mention this because Malcolm Nash has died.

As soon as I saw this sad news - via a brief Tweet, inevitably - then as someone who has never been the greatest follower of cricket, I thought: "Malcolm Nash. Wasn’t he that bloke Sobers hit for six sixes?"

Which of course, within, as he put it, "five minutes" of a lifetime of sporting achievement, he was.

By all accounts, those who knew Malcolm Nash, those who played with him for Glamorgan, or who played against him, such as Sobers, remember a fully-rounded, much-loved and highly successful operator.

It’s just that…well, take a look at the headlines.

"Glamorgan’s Malcolm Nash, who Garry Sobers hit for six sixes in an over, dies at 74," says ESPNcricinfom.com.

 Or, grammatically correct: "Malcolm Nash, who was hit by Garfield Sobers for six sixes in an over, dies at 74," says the Times of India.

The Daily Mail’s intro, meanwhile: "Malcolm Nash, the Glamorgan bowler who entered cricket folklore when Sir Garfield Sobers struck him for six sixes in an over, has died.."

There’s no getting away from it. Nash has taken, and always will have taken, his place in a rich tapestry of errant sporting threads.

A little over three months before Sobers smashed the sixth ball of that over clean over the East Terrace of the St Helens Cricket Ground - to the accompaniment of the immortal line of commentator Wilf Wooller: "And he’s done it! He’s done it! And my goodness it’s gone…way down to Swansea” - there had been a similar moment of sporting drama on the sodden turf of Wembley.

On May 11, 1968, Don Fox played so well for Wakefield Trinity in the Rugby League Challenge Cup final, on a pitch turned into a sea of mud by two downpours during play, that as the game drew towards its close he was voted as man of the match and winner of the Lance Todd Trophy.

At that point Trinity trailed Leeds 11-7, but they scored a try between the posts in the final minute to make it 11-10, and Fox had only to convert from beneath the posts to add another trophy to his collection on that day.

As history records, again and again, he slipped on the run-up and skewed the heavy, slippery ball wide before sinking to his knees in momentary despair as Leeds celebrated the victory that had returned to them.

As commentator Eddie Waring observed, with the best two words he ever uttered: "Poor lad."

In his obituary for Fox in 2008, The Independent’s admirable Rugby League correspondent Dave Hadfield wrote: "Don Fox was an outstanding rugby league player, in positions as diverse as scrum-half and prop, who had the misfortune to be forever associated with the one disastrous moment of a distinguished career."

That sentence is a template into which a long, wretched sequence of sporting protagonists readily fit.

Sheffield Wednesday’s Gerry Young, prone on the turf after the slip that had let Everton’s Derek Temple to make it 3-2 to the team that had been 2-0 down  n the 1966 FA Cup final.

Lindsey Jacobellis, prone on the ground after misjudging a grab of her board on the second-to-last jump in the Snowboard Cross final at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, a manoeuvre she attempted for "fun" as she glid in to apparent victory with a 43-metres, three-second lead. By the time picked herself up and got across the line, gold had turned to silver.

France’s Jean de Velde is taking off his shoes and socks and paddling into the lake on the 18th green at Carnoustie. Why? Because, having arrived at the last hole with victory guaranteed in the 1999 Open gold championship, even if he made a double bogey, he has elected to try and hack his ball out, rather than forfeiting a shot and taking a drop. He finishes with a triple bogey, which means a playoff against home golfer Paul Lawrie. Which, of course, he loses…

Gareth Southgate turns away and puts his arms behind his head after seeing his spot kick, the sixth for England in a penalty shoot-out at Wembley, saved by Andreas Kopke – which means Germany, rather than the hosts, go through the final of Euro 1996. Which of course they go on to win.

There is an almost endless store of similar examples of sporting heart-in-mouth, head-in-hands moments. Bear with me, because I am going to enumerate each and every one of them.

No I’m not. You get the picture.

Hadfield’s obit on Fox concluded thus: "Unlike his brothers, Don was not directly involved in rugby after his retirement. They remained and remain very public figures; by contrast, he was an intensely private man. Those close to him say that he never entirely got over the trauma of that afternoon at Wembley 40 years ago."

You like to think that it was, or is not so for other sportsmen and women who have experienced moments that put you in mind of the old Iago quote from Othello: “the thought whereof doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards.”

Southgate, feted last year for his admirable management of the England football team at the World Cup, is one of those rare and indefatigable souls who has probably managed the supreme feat of superimposing a secondary, positive image on popular memory.

"I’ve learnt a million things from the day and the years that have followed it,2 Southgate said in the run-up to last year’s World Cup. "The biggest thing being that when something goes wrong in your life, it doesn’t finish you."

Like Southgate, Nash was tough enough, and accomplished enough, to ride his fate.

As the BBC sport obituary loyally records, Nash took 993 first-class wickets between 1966 and 1983 and was Glamorgan's leading wicket-taker when they won the County Championship in 1969.

Also in 1968 this left-arm bowler helped Glamorgan to defeat Australia; nine years later he helped his county to reach a first one-day final at Lord's in 1977.

Sobers, the former West Indies captain who was playing on that day in August for Nottinghamshire, paid tribute to his former opponent upon his death.

"He was a good friend of mine and we always kept that friendship, he was a nice man," said Sobers.

"We played against each other and I was fortunate to hit six sixes against him but things never changed.

"As far as we were concerned we were always friends in spite of what happened on the cricket field.”

Sobers recalled how Nash kept his sense of humour despite being hit for six sixes.

"When we were asked to go up to be interviewed afterwards I looked back over my shoulder and saw him smiling," Sobers recalled.

"I said, 'Mally, what are you smiling at?'

"And he said 'I want you to know you could not have achieved this without me!'"

Now that is class.