Is it unfair to posit that De Kock’s unfinished symphonies in this year’s IPL wasn’t all he needed to get off his chest?
Telford Vice | Cape Town
QUINTON de Kock and his emotions could be likened to a bad marriage: they aren’t often seen together in a public place.
So the crowd at the DY Patil Stadium in Mumbai on Wednesday, and the exponentially bigger television audience watching Lucknow Super Giants’ game against Kolkata Knight Riders, should consider themselves blessed.
Once his cut off André Russell had sped across the boundary, taking him to his second IPL ton off 59 deliveries on his way to a 70-ball 140 not out, De Kock sank to both knees. His helmeted head kept descending, and came to earth with a bump. He punched the turf as he knelt. Then he rose and punched his bat, earning new respect for batting gloves everywhere. With his eyes and mouth and everything else about him wide open to the world, he launched a primal yawp into the night that is no doubt fluttering butterfly wings in the Amazon jungle as we speak.
De Kock has scored six Test and 17 ODI centuries. Another 14 first-class, list A or T20 hundreds had boomed off his bat before Wednesday. None, surely, has he celebrated in this fashion. He has tended to raise his bat neither with discernible pride nor passion and aim a smile-less, sleepy schoolboy look at his applauders. He does this because he knows it is expected of him. He gets it over with. He doesn’t revel in the moment. As soon as could be deemed polite, he’s back in his stance and ready to crack on.
Wednesday was different. In the moments after he reached his century, De Kock was the entire contents of a brand new tube of toothpaste sent arching out of the bathroom window with one mighty squeeze of both hands. He was a penguin loosed from ponderously plodding the ice and flying free and fancy through the water. He was a teenager let out of the house after dark for the first time. And he ain’t comin’ back. He was a jolt of raw emotion.
Cricket, for people like De Kock, is not about ceremony or gesture. It’s about action, about getting stuff done, and only about what’s needed to make that happen. When that changes, he doesn’t take it well. Infamously, he refused to play in South Africa’s T20 World Cup game against West Indies in Dubai in October rather than take a knee before the match, as the team had been directed to do by CSA’s board. What about, the whatabouterers will whine, the hand signal De Kock made in June while scoring an undefeated 141 in a Test against West Indies in St Lucia? He said he was paying tribute to a friend who had had a finger “shot off” in Afghanistan. Maybe, if the ceremony or gesture is personal — not about some bigger ideal — he’s OK with it. Wednesday’s performance was as personal as anyone could safely deliver without hurting themselves.
“It was just a bit of frustration that came out,” De Kock told a television interviewer afterwards. “The last couple of games, just the way I’ve been getting out … I’ve been feeling very good and nothing has been coming of it. So it was nice to come out … and the feeling of actually having done it; just a bit of a release. I was trying to keep it in but when I let go it just happened.”
Before Wednesday, De Kock had passed 50 three times in 13 innings in this year’s IPL. Each time his strike rate has leapt upward — from 135.56 to 153.85 to 172.41 to a round 200 in his latest assault. Think of that progression as the shaking of a bottle of champagne, sending an ever stronger stream of bubbles racing towards the cork and willing it to burst open with aplomb. There’s no suppressing that.
Thus uncorked, De Kock finished with a flourish in the last over of the innings, making no less than Tim Southee look like little more than a bowling machine as he reeled off a hattrick of more or less straight sixes. He seemed less a batter facing one of the game’s better fast bowlers on cricket’s biggest stage than a business executive interrupting his journey home from a difficult day at the office to tee off his vexation on the driving range.
It’s already part of IPL lore than De Kock’s innings is the highest yet made this year — his 10 sixes are another milestone for 2022 — and behind only Chris Gayle’s undefeated 175 and Brendon McCullum’s 158 not out in the tournament’s 15 editions. Neither Gayle nor McCullum had to bother with keeping wicket. So De Kock’s effort is the highest by an IPL stumper. Only 10 of the 73 centuries seen in the IPL have been scored by the designated wicketkeeper.
No-one has made more runs in the last five overs of a completed IPL innings than the 71 De Kock hammered off 22 deliveries on Wednesday, and the unbroken stand of 210 he shared with KL Rahul is the IPL’s record partnership for the first wicket. That’s the only time a pair of openers have batted through all 20 overs in the history of the competition.
Is it unfair to posit that De Kock’s unfinished symphonies in this year’s IPL wasn’t all he needed to get off his chest? Little more than a year ago he was South Africa’s all-format captain, albeit not permanently in Test cricket. He was stung by having the white-ball leadership, which he was appointed to in February 2020, taken away in March 2021 in the wake of his team winning only six of 11 games and just one of five series. The truth was that he made at best an aloof and at worst an out-of-touch captain liable, for instance, to leave floundering bowlers to their own devices without so much as putting an arm around their shoulders. A confirmed creature of the outdoors, De Kock struggled with bubble life enough to be granted a mental health break by CSA. His refusal to kneel made many South Africans consider him a racist hiding in plain view. As unhappily, others championed him as a standard-bearer for toxic whiteness. No-one, not even sleepy schoolboys who don’t have to interact with the world outside their door beyond playing cricket better than almost anyone else on the planet, would hold up under all that. So in December, in the throes of an intense Test series against India, he announced his immediate retirement from the format as a player.
Thus De Kock reaping Wednesday’s whirlwind in the way he did will be seen, rightly or not, as proof that he has come through more and greater tests than he would have expected to encounter on his journey through cricket pretty much in one piece. Or as a reconstructed version of himself. Or as someone who has learnt the value of letting go and just letting it happen. Whatever you think of any aspect of the De Kock phenomenon, that’s good. Maybe that marriage isn’t so bad after all.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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