“Nee! Nee! Nee! Nee! Nee! Nee!” – Quinton de Kock turns down a single.
Telford Vice / Palermo, Sicily
“THERE is so much to play for,” Nick Knight said on television moments before England took the field, and Janneman Malan and Quinton de Kock walked out to open the batting, at a cloudy Headingley on Sunday. Knight was wrong. There was nothing to play for: no World Cup Super League points, no other ODIs for South Africa until October and for England until November, and thus no real reason to bother building for a future filled with T20Is and Tests.
But that doesn’t matter to players who have spent most of their lives fuelled by competitiveness. Pitch the stumps, toss a coin and watch them flick the switch, whether they’re in a backyard, a gully or on the game’s most storied grounds. And especially when the match will, weather permitting, decide a series.
Certainly, if anyone told De Kock Sunday’s proceedings were irrelevant, he wasn’t listening. England’s bowlers and fielders looked flat — surely a consequence of playing their 10th match in a day more than three weeks — and the pitch was a belter, but De Kock still needed to bring his A game to make the most of those advantages. He did exactly that with stroke selection, timing and placement fixed firmly on the ridiculous side of sublime.
De Kock missed out on contributing significantly to South Africa’s record high total in ODIs in England — 333/5 — in Chester-le-Street on Tuesday, when Sam Curran bowled him for 19. On Friday, in the throes of the visitors spiralling to their joint lowest total in England — 83 — and being bowled out in the fewest number of deliveries by any opponents anywhere — 124 — he made five before blipping a leading edge to short cover off David Willey. He was first out on Tuesday and, on Friday, the third of four South Africans dismissed with the total refusing to budge from six.
Other players might have taken guard on Sunday trying to blot out thoughts of where their next big innings was coming from, even if they had, as De Kock had, come to England having passed 50 in half of their previous 14 innings in the format and scored centuries in three of them. The deliveries that knocked him over in the first two games — a leg-cutter on Tuesday, an away-swinger on Friday — had zigged off the seam. Would he be overly wary of movement, and not play as freely as he might have, as a consequence?
Malan took first strike, so De Kock would have seen Reece Topley’s opening delivery veer through the air towards the right-hander, who dabbed it to midwicket for a single. The second ball did much the same, curving away from the left-handed De Kock, who drove it into the covers for two. He played the shot with the ease and comfort of someone who never doubted that he would.
It took 19 deliveries for De Kock to register the first boundary of the match, picking an inswinger from Willey off his pads and sending it through midwicket with intent that seemed preordained. Malan hit the next two fours in the space of three balls in the next over, off-driving Topley elegantly and then smacking him over the covers with his bat high and horizontal. Two deliveries later, Malan was out: his driving bat advanced too far ahead of his body, and the ball looped limply to point.
Rassie van der Dussen, a hundred hero in Tuesday’s soaring heat, looked like he had set a course for another pile of runs when he helped De Kock reach 50 off 39 balls — which he did with fours through deep third and cover off Adil Rashid’s first two deliveries of the game. But, with the stand worth 75 off 69, Van der Dussen swept Rashid straight into deep square leg’s hands and was gone for 26.
The closest England had come to removing De Kock was in the ninth over, when Willey’s throw from midwicket missed with the diving South African well short of his ground. Would he be undone by the rain that halted the action in the 21st over, when he was 69? No. Or, as De Kock yelled after the resumption almost two hours later when he was 91 and Aiden Markram wanted a single from a bunt to midwicket off Moeen Ali: “Nee! Nee! Nee! Nee! Nee! Nee!” That’s no, six times, in Afrikaans, if you hadn’t translated it yourself. Three balls later, with De Kock eight short of his century having faced 76 balls, the rain returned to chase the players from the field. Ninety minutes after that, the match was abandoned.
Some will consider De Kock’s marooning a travesty. How could the gods be so heartless as to not grant him the hundred he so deserved? Others will be grateful that they were able to watch one of the finest innings any of us will see; a thing of beauty and sophistication devoid of anything so discordant as bravado or brute force. De Kock has scored 17 ODI centuries but has rarely, if ever, batted as well as he did on Sunday.
At a press conference he was asked whether his retirement from Test cricket in December, an announcement that was met with disbelief wherever cricket is played, allowed him to become a better player? He mulled over the question for a moment, then said: “I don’t think so. I haven’t really thought about it, to be honest. I think I’ve always been a decent white-ball player anyway, so I don’t know if it is that. I haven’t really looked into that.”
That nobody won a match that didn’t matter, except for the purposes of deciding a series that also didn’t matter, was neither here nor there. That De Kock was able to rise above the circumstances and bat as if so much was on the line mattered far more. Sometimes not thinking about all that matters most.
That’s what sets the best apart, whether they’re playing in a backyard, a gully or on the game’s most storied grounds.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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