ALL day at the Oval yesterday boundaries flowed like water, records fell like autumn leaves and between them Surrey, the victors, and Glamorgan, the truly gallant losers, scored 867 runs in 99 overs and five balls.

There is simply no better place to bat in the world than on a well-prepared pitch at the Oval on a sunny day with a dry outfield and a 60-yard boundary on one side. There never has been and there never will be. In these perfect conditions Glamorgan set out to score 439 in 50 overs to overhaul the highest score ever made in one-day cricket anywhere in the world and they came within two boundary hits of doing it.

The overall match aggregate surpassed by 113 runs the previous record for the number scored in a one-day game -754 by India against India B at Madras in 2000-01. In all, there were 28 sixes, 87 fours and almost too many records to count. Surrey's 438 for five, the product mainly of a phenomenal piece of cultured hitting by Alistair Brown, whose 268 is comfortably the highest individual score, was no proof against defeat.

Glamorgan had started the last ten overs needing 103, with five wickets still in hand. Had David Hemp, the third century-maker of the game, been able to take stock for a moment, he might not have pulled Martin Bicknell to mid-on off the first ball of the 41st over, but this was a day for instinctive stroke-making and even this setback did not stop the bold Welsh advance on Surrey's apparently unassailable fortress of a total.

Darren Thomas, who had conceded more runs than any man before in this competition, 108 in nine overs, hit with strength and a keen eye to make 71 not out off 41 balls, adding three more sixes to the day's tally and keeping the chase going until the fourth ball of the final over when he lost the strike.

If Dean Cosker, the No 11, had succeeded in hitting the fifth ball for six, rather than being castled by a heartily relieved Adam Hollioake, they would have needed only four more off the last ball to win and thus to reach the quarter-final of the Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy.

That they came so close against a home attack that included six Test bowlers owed most to Robert Croft, the acting Glamorgan captain, who had answered Brown's terrific innings with no lesser an example of the art of keeping your head still and playing orthodox attacking strokes to almost every ball bowled. He started as he meant to proceed, hitting the first five balls of Martin Bicknell's opening over for four with defiant ease.

On such a flawless pitch as this, absolutely even in bounce and easy paced without being slow, Croft showed by hitting 18 fours and three sixes that nothing was impossible. To some extent he thereby put into perspective one of the greatest pieces of one-day hitting ever witnessed. Brown already held the record for the highest individual score in the 40-over county competition, his 203 against Hampshire at Guildford in 1997. Now he scored 268, a total good enough to win most 50-over games, and the highest individual innings ever in professional one-day cricket, surpassing Graeme Pollock's 222 for Eastern Province against Border 28 years ago.

Opening the batting yesterday, this year's Surrey beneficiary -a failed international batsman, perhaps, but soon, surely, to be comfortably and deservedly affluent -was out off the first ball of the fiftieth over, his 160th. The great majority of his 30 fours and 12 sixes were either pulled over the short boundary on the gas holder side, many of them into the road beside the Cricketers Inn, or driven on the up through extra cover with stunning power. His six to the distant Harleyford Road boundary was a fierce cut off Thomas.

Brown is a daunting man to bowl to on a pitch as good as this, always balanced, unerringly quick to pick the length and never taking his eye off the ball. He had butterflies before going out to bat yesterday, which he took to be a good sign.

"I'm in good form and my feet were moving right," he said. "I got 268 more than I did against Scotland. The shots I enjoyed most were the sixes I hit when Darren Thomas pitched it short. I was very nervous when Martin Bicknell's first five balls of the innings were hit so easily for four, but I didn't think they could keep it up. I never thought they would get anywhere near as close as that."

Only Michael Kasprowicz kept any sort of control for Glamorgan, but the bowlers were generally defenceless and the captains, too. Croft, deputising for Steve James, whose three-year-old daughter is in hospital, did little wrong, but Hollioake, happily back at Surrey's helm, changed his bowling all the time. With two run-outs, the first from a direct hit, and five wickets as reward for his famously cunning changes of pace, he was mainly responsible for denying Glamorgan what would have been the most famous one-day victory of all.

This is known these days as the AMP Oval, after Surrey's sponsors. It ought to be the Ample Oval. It was here that England scored the highest Test score, 903 for seven; that Surrey and Lancashire made 1,650 runs for 19 wickets in the County Championship in 1990 and that Worcestershire and Surrey each scored more than 350 in a NatWest semi-final in 1994. But this game relegated that last statistic to second place and Brown's innings eclipsed Tom Moody's record for the competition against another first-class county, 180 not out in the same game.

I would hesitate to call this the greatest one-day game, except in terms of runs scored. Certainly it was a batting feast of extraordinary richness but the short boundary must temper the tendency to hyperbolise.

"We have to keep the strips in the middle for the Test match, two one-day internationals and the possibility of televised quarter or semifinals," Paul Brind, the groundsman, who had nothing for which to apologise, said. Nevertheless, 60 yards 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.

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