The obscenely talented boy next door

www.GOcricket.com - http://www.gocricket.com/columns/telford-vice/IPL-7-AB-de-Villiers-the-obscenely-talented-boy-next-door/articleshow/35057005.cms

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

“So, what’s he like,” asked a friend who does not have to put up with cricket and cricketers for a living. Oh dear. Did he have to? The question brings out the worst in reporters, who when they are asked to provide a character reference for a player cannot help but reach for the big book of stereotypes.

“Arrogant,” they will say most often. Also among the usual suspects are “stupid”, “monosyllabic”, “unemployable beyond the boundary”, “nasty”, “spoilt rotten”, and “unbelievably conceited”.

This is partly because reporters want to make clear that dealing with cricketers at a professional level is not the Disney movie that civilians think it is, and partly because depressingly often any of the above descriptions - or combination of them - is accurate.

Somehow, cricket aficionados expect their game not to be as infected by as many walking, talking miseries as any other avenue of life. Somehow, they are wrong.

But not always. This time, the player in question does not fit the identikits of any of the above usual suspects. He is strangely, rarely normal in a way that is utterly at odds with his outsized talent. If anyone has an excuse to be arrogant, conceited or spoilt, this man does.

Thing is, AB de Villiers is not made that way. Much as it grates reporters to say so, he is intelligent, polite and unaffected by the fuss that has swirled around his life since he played his first outrageous stroke. Many outrageous strokes later, that has not changed.

Sachin Tendulkar, the paragon by which players’ personalities will be measured for decades yet, glided through his career on an unseen cushion of apparently divine grace. Tendulkar the player and Tendulkar the man are inseparable in the public mind.

Not so De Villiers the bloke, who does not square with De Villiers the player. Instead, he is imperfectly human; entirely likely to stumble over the simplest sentence - Afrikaans, not English, is his first language - then forget what mid-on translates into in Afrikaans, or turn up with hair that looks like it has not seen a comb in a week, or visibly lose his cool (but never his manners) under probing questioning.

Can the player who could, if he chose, bowl himself the unplayable ball, play the unplayable shot, and take the uncatchable catch to dismiss himself be the same guy who has pitched up to a post-match press conference barefoot with a plate of food precariously placed on his palm?

Is the man who has made fools out of those who have said - not to mention wrote - that he could not possibly captain and keep wicket and hold down an important batting position in South Africa’s one-day team or make a reasonable facsimile of a Test wicketkeeper the same fella who wobbled round midnight into a bar called, superbly, “The Lucky Shag” on the banks of the Swan River in Perth after Australia had been beaten in 2011-2012 to tell reporters who owned up to their misjudgments, “And have I ever complained? You have a job to do. I understand ...”

Other rock star cricketers get themselves tattooed or cover their prematurely balding pates with fake hair or lurch from one model girlfriend to another. De Villiers, balding and uninked, got married.

He is the obscenely gifted boy next door, the millionaire who mows his own lawn, the immensely respected public figure who gives perfect strangers the respect he assumes they have earned.

Much of this is rooted in De Villiers’ upbringing. This is how middle class Afrikaners are. Faf du Plessis is cut from similar cloth - although he would take issue with that on the grounds that he does not have De Villiers’ depth of talent. De Villiers would counter that he does not have Du Plessis’ reserves of resolve. From there the conversation would go around in ever more polite circles that would make lesser beings want to slap the both of them out of sheer frustration at their own relative inadequacy.

So, what’s he like? Let us start by saying what he is not like - neither arrogant, stupid, monosyllabic, unemployable beyond the boundary, nasty, spoilt rotten, nor at all conceited.

He’s AB positive. That’s what he’s like.