Do you know AB? None of us do, even if we think we do

● “Do you know AB de Villiers?” It seemed a reasonable question to toss from one end of a bench to the other in Deptford Park, just south of the Thames in London, this week.

At one end sat this reporter, both his typing fingers poised crookedly above a laptop on which a piece on De Villiers and the World Cup and all that — yes, another one — was taking shape.

At the other end sat a woman whose accent had by then identified her as having Caribbean roots.

So there seemed a decent chance she would know who De Villiers was.

“Who? No.”

“He’s a famous cricketer from SA. A very famous cricketer. That’s him out there; in the pink shirt.”

And there De Villiers was indeed, on hand to open an artificial pitch laid by the London Cricket Trust (LCT), a charity formed by Essex, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey, which works with the England and Wales Cricket Board to promote the playing of cricket in London’s public parks.

The LCT plans to put 50 such surfaces and net facilities in parks across the city in a two-year project scheduled to end in 2020.

With De Villiers was a gaggle of about 30 children — two of who turned out to belong to my fellow benchwarmer — who knew exactly who the oke in the pink Middlesex T20 shirt was.

But he looked a little out of his lane in jeans and without bat and pads. So, even if you did know who he was, from 50m away you might not have spotted him. Hence the original question.

“A famous cricketer you say? I’m getting a picture …”

With that she was off. But her phone had died. So the photograph of De Villiers putting an arm around each of her kids’ shoulders was taken by the fella at the other end of the park bench, and emailed to her. Pleasure, ma’am.

He’s a famous cricketer from SA ... That’s him out there; in the pink shirt

De Villiers is in England to play for Middlesex in the county T20 competition. Two days later he made his debut at Lord’s, which turned out to be another walk in the park.

De Villiers did what De Villiers does and hammered five fours and six sixes in his unbeaten 88, which screamed into the scorebook at a touch faster than two runs a ball.

You wonder how much pink gin went down the wrong way in the Pavilion, or was spluttered onto egg-and-bacon ties, because of De Villiers’ indecent haste.

That’s if any Marylebone Cricket Club members would have braved turning up for a T20 so soon after having survived the madness of last Sunday’s men’s World Cup.

There’s sadness in the fact that De Villiers batted on the same pitch used for Sunday’s epic, the greatest game of cricket yet played.

Until April 3 last year, the last time he was on the field as an international player, he graced the game’s biggest stage. Now he is among its travelling circus performers.

Still, he hadn’t expected to hit the ground running as fast as he did, as he acknowledged after the game: “Things keep surprising me every day.”

Don’t they just. If you kept track of De Villiers’ reaction to the revelation that he was available — though ineligible — for SA’s World Cup squad despite his retirement, you would have been forgiven for thinking he considered himself the centre of SA cricket.

If you read the statements prepared in his name, that is, which cast him as someone who couldn’t countenance the possibility that he is as capable of doing the wrong thing as the rest of us.

A different De Villiers presented himself at Deptford Park, a regular fella there to do his bit for his new employers, have some fun with the kids, chat casually with anyone who wanted to, and give one-on-one interviews to a slew of attendant reporters.

Do you know AB de Villiers?

None of us do, even if we think we do. There’s a lot more to anyone, even very famous cricketers, than we can see for ourselves. And that’s how it should be: even De Villiers is human.