De Villiers’ ‘superhuman’ show
Sharjah, UAE - Genius is hard to describe. AB de Villiers scored an unbeaten 73 off 33 balls on Monday night against the Kolkata Knight Riders, on a pitch where everyone else made 218 off 207, and while that's obviously extraordinary, it didn't look extraordinary. Or let's put it this way. It didn't look differently extraordinary.
Bangalore won the match by 82 runs as they restricted Kolkata to 112 for nine after scoring 194 for two, thanks to de Villiers' knock and knocks by Aaron Finch (47) and skipper Virat Kohli (33 not out).
It looked like any other extraordinary T20 innings de Villiers has played. He didn't stand differently at the crease, or grip his bat differently, or play any shots you haven't seen before. There were no new tactics devised on the spur of the moment to combat a slow and grippy pitch where every other batsman struggled for fluency. It was just AB de Villiers batting like AB de Villiers.
It was the kind of innings that makes you reach for supernatural explanations. Virat Kohli faced 28 balls in the same innings and hit just one boundary, off his outside edge. He watched all of de Villiers' innings from the other end, and at the presentation ceremony called him 'superhuman'.
He spoke of the 'zing' in de Villiers' eyes. De Villiers himself said he'd felt an 'energy' when he'd got on the bus to the stadium, and felt 'a bit of light out of my eye'.
There were certainly moments during de Villiers' innings when a ghostly light seemed to shine from his eyes.
Something not quite of this world seemed to take place, for instance, when he drove the third ball of his innings straight back down the pitch. The ball hit the stumps at the other end, deflected by some 45 degrees, beat mid-off's dive to his left, and kept running away from that fielder even as he sprang up and gave chase, seeming to accelerate as it approached the boundary as if the laws of physics had been briefly suspended.
As remarkable as the innings was, though, we know it was bat and ball and flesh and blood, and it was all explicable in some way. Kohli got to the essence of it.
"I just have to say that a lot of people can do what you've seen in the other games, but on a pitch like that, to bat like that, I think it's only AB who can do that, just because of the way he sets up and he's so still when he's seeing the ball clearly and he's so dangerous, because he can wait for the slower balls and deposit them out of the stadium, so it was a special knock," Kohli said. Still.
When everything is working well, de Villiers' bat-swing is like a golf swing. He explains this as what he calls his 'box theory'.
"I always talk about a little box that's around me," he says.
"I don't want any part of my bat, feet, head, nothing, to leave this box. Everything must happen in this box, because that's where I have all my power, right here, in this box, everything to be played right here.
“In golf, they talk about a compact golf swing. You've got to feel like you're almost swinging in a box, and it's the same with my batting."
You’ve got to feel like you’re almost swinging in a box, and it’s the same with my batting
AB DE VILLIERS