Leading Edge: Play that funky music, AB

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

SOMETIMES, you have to wonder whether AB de Villiers’ initials stand for something other than the advertised Abraham Benjamin. Something like Absolutely Brilliant. Tuesday was one of those times. And Friday.

On Tuesday, in the first one-day international in Mount Maunganui, De Villiers was made to wait 47 balls for his first four.

Not that it mattered. Only sad bastards like TS Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock measure their lives in things like coffee spoons. If your favourite Pollock is Jackson you will know and appreciate that there is more to the artistry of batting than boundaries bashed every which way.

Fours and sixes are all very well, but there was more creative confidence in the way De Villiers took 31 runs of the first 46 balls he faced than anything a brutal bludgeoner like Virender Sehwag might have wrought.

Then came delivery No. 47, bowled by that returning old stager, Dan Vettori. Flexing his wrists, De Villiers muscled the ball ever so elegantly through mid-on for four. Vettori’s next effort disappeared down the ground, straight, sweet, and sizzling, for another boundary.

Of his next 15 balls, De Villiers sent three scurrying to the fence. He revised the equation with the last six, putting another three past the field.

Thirty-six of De Villiers’ 89 not out came in fours. But it was the other 53 that stuck out for their enterprise and daring, their fluid footwork, their precise intent, their perfect marriage of muscle and mind. To label De Villiers’ strokes in the tired tradition of cuts, drives, sweeps and pulls would be to miss the point.

De Villiers is jazz at the crease. If you must, you could call what he does bebop, hard bop, post bop, modal, swing, syncopated, acid, cool, hot, ragtime, or straight-ahead. Or you could shut the hell up and enjoy. In the same way that no categorisation stayed pinned to Miles Davis, so there is no box that will fit De Villiers.

If that’s not batting that De Villiers does, what exactly does he do? He makes things happen. Watch.

On Friday, when the second ODI was played at Mount Maunganui, De Villiers did so in a way that not even he had dared to before. In his 164 previous ODIs for SA, he had bowled only once: two overs against Zimbabwe in Harare last month in which he conceded 13 runs and took no wickets.

But, with the 10th delivery he bowled on Friday - a long hop, it has to be said - De Villiers induced a flaccid flap from Tom Latham that deposited the ball into Hashim Amla’s hands at short fine leg.

The delivery lacked flair, but not De Villiers’ decision to bring himself on in the 15th over ahead of Imran Tahir.

Then De Villiers took his second wicket, and properly. Trent Boult backed away to leg to make some space to smash the ball all the way to the south island. But De Villiers saw him coming, and speared a slower delivery into Boult’s pads - from where it caromed onto his stumps.

A slower ball! In 101 tests, 173 ODIs, 10 T20s and almost a dozen years playing at the highest level and along the way taking 662 wickets across those formats, Makhaya Ntini never mastered the subtlety of that art. And here comes De Villiers, a veritable upstart at the bowling crease, getting people out with the damned thing.

There have been many other examples of De Villiers’ genius where those came from, and there will be many more. South Africans should not be proud - they should be relieved other teams and their supporters have to find a way past him, and not theirs.

A(bsolutely) B(rilliant) de Villiers, jou lekker ding.