Zondo can prove that he is the real deal

HE’S played 240 matches across all formats and at all levels, taken guard 275 times, scored 12 centuries and 46 half-centuries in his aggregate of 7 783 runs, which gives him an average of 31.63.

He’s also bowled 3 483 balls of offspin and taken 78 wickets – two of them for four runs in the five deliveries he has sent down in the Africa Cup.

Who is he? Here’s a clue: he went to the same school as Errol Stewart, Mickey Arthur and Robbie Frylinck, not to mention those two famous Chads: Ho and Le Clos.

Still stumped? His high school coach thinks he could be special enough to share a sentence with modern batting’s resident genius.

“He’s a very versatile player,” Fabian Lazarus, head coach at Westville Boys’ High, said. “He’s got all the shots and he scores all around the wicket – a bit like AB de Villiers.

His name is Khaya Zondo and he is part of SA’s Twenty20 and one-day squads in India, an achievement he earned on the back of scoring 154 runs at 38.50 in four innings for SA A in a one-day triangular tournament on the subcontinent in August.

If only things were that simple. The facts that Zondo is black, uncapped at international level and South African mean many of his compatriots will have leapt to the assumption that he owes his selection to affirmative action more than anything else.

Either way, the only person who can reveal the truth is Zondo himself.