Once again, the Proteas have bombed out of a World Cup. Not only did South Africa suffer a predictably bitter defeat to Australia, they lost something more – one of the finest ODI cricketers ever, Quinton de Kock.
Although Quinton de Kock has announced his retirement from ODI cricket, you might be surprised to know that he’s only 30. Yes, his 31st birthday is only days away, but he seems to have been around for ever, at least since Lemon Curd yoghurt and Spotify and baseball caps. These, I must emphasise, need to be worn the correct way. There is nothing worse than a middle-class suburbanite wearing his Red Sox cap the wrong way round.
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Once again, the Proteas have bombed out of a World Cup. Not only did South Africa suffer a predictably bitter defeat to Australia, they lost something more – one of the finest ODI cricketers ever, Quinton de Kock.
Although Quinton de Kock has announced his retirement from ODI cricket, you might be surprised to know that he’s only 30. Yes, his 31st birthday is only days away, but he seems to have been around for ever, at least since Lemon Curd yoghurt and Spotify and baseball caps. These, I must emphasise, need to be worn the correct way. There is nothing worse than a middle-class suburbanite wearing his Red Sox cap the wrong way round.
Donate to The Luke Alfred Show on Patreon.
Get my book: Vuvuzela Dawn: 25 Sporting Stories that Shaped a New Nation.
Get full written episodes of the show a day early on Substack.
Check out The Luke Alfred Show on YouTube and Facebook.
Once again, the Proteas have bombed out of a World Cup. Not only did South Africa suffer a predictably bitter defeat to Australia, they lost something more – one of the finest ODI cricketers ever, Quinton de Kock.
Although Quinton de Kock has announced his retirement from ODI cricket, you might be surprised to know that he’s only 30. Yes, his 31st birthday is only days away, but he seems to have been around for ever, at least since Lemon Curd yoghurt and Spotify and baseball caps. These, I must emphasise, need to be worn the correct way. There is nothing worse than a middle-class suburbanite wearing his Red Sox cap the wrong way round.
The grotesque irony of Quinnie retiring at the age he has is that it’s roundabout now that most batsmen and spinners will reliably tell you that they’re playing the best cricket of their lives. They’ve lost the impetuosity of youth that reflexively blames others for their failures. They might be in a serious relationship or even have kids, and this has made them realise that there’s more to life than hitting balls in the nets.
It makes them aware – as they weren’t in their callow 20s – that cricket is often about anything but cricket. It’s about finding a reliable balance between cricket and whatever those things that are not-cricket are. Cricket benefits immensely from not-cricket. Not-cricket – whether that’s surfing or community out-reach or further education or macramé – is a cricketer’s wonder drug.
We forget that pretty amazingly, De Kock smuggled three World Cups – 2015, 2019 and 2023 – into his One-Day International career now he’s chucking it in to become a T20 privateer. The South African cricket establishment should be having a quick whip round to buy De Kock a swanky pad above Clifton Fourth Beach to keep him in the green and gold but instead he’ll be heading off into the wilderness.
Behind him trails a remarkable record to which we will get in a moment; and behind that trails the mildly unsatisfactory impression that here was a brilliant maverick who no-one really understood.
One way to understand De Kock is to look at the numbers. I’m being slightly disingenuous here. Looking at the numbers isn’t really a means of understanding Quinnie. Understanding Quinnie is probably a lifetime’s work, an exercise, furthermore, in understanding understanding but as we can’t embark on too ambitious a philosophical project in this podcast, let’s content ourselves with the story of the numbers for the time being.
At least the music of numbers gives us a glimpse of the ghost of understanding. This as we battle to get to grips with the real Quinnie. For the record, De Kock played 155 ODIs for the Proteas, scoring 21 centuries. Four of these centuries – against Sri Lanka, Australia, Bangladesh and New Zealand – came in the 2023 World Cup won by Australia on Sunday.
Twenty-one centuries puts him 13th on the all-time list of ODI centurions, neatly sandwiched between Sri Lanka’s Tillakaratne Dilshan in 12th spot (22 centuries in 330 ODIs), and New Zealand’s Ross Taylor (21 tons in 236 ODIs) in 14th.
You can immediately sense, just by comparing the statistics of those directly above and below him, that De Kock has scored those centuries in a remarkably quick time.
To give you a point of comparison, Kumar Sangakarra, the Sri Lankan great, scored four more ODI centuries – he is ninth on the list – but did so in 249 more matches; Saurav Ganguly scored one more ODI hundred than Quinnie (so is 11th on the list compared to De Kock’s 13th) but did so in 156 more matches.
De Kock might be 13th on the list but in many other respects – and this is very important in our quest for understanding – he’s in such elite company that he’s not at the top table but at the table above the top table.
If we take De Kock’s conversion rate (of going on to hundreds after he’s reached 50), and his strike rate (of runs scored per hundred balls faced), an even more accurate picture of his brilliance emerges. In fact, we find him in rarefied company with only three other players of the modern era: Virat Kohli, David Warner and AB de Villiers.
First, Kohli. At time of writing, Kohli has scored 50 – yes, 50 – ODI hundreds in 292 matches, at a remarkable rate of one hundred every six-or-so ODIs. This is much better than De Kock, who scored a hundred approximately every seven-and-a-half ODIs.
Where De Kock is better than Kohli is in runs scored per hundred balls faced – strike rate, in other words. The difference isn’t much, but De Kock scores three more runs per hundred runs scored than Kohli, although the sample size in Kohli’s case is significantly larger and is therefore more likely to be accurate.
As far as strike rate is concerned, there are only two players of recent memory who have better strike rates than De Kock in ODIs: Warner and De Villiers. Warner’s is very slightly better (and the Australian has scored one more ODI century in six more matches) and De Villiers’s is appreciably better.
In point of fact, De Villiers is the only player in the list of 13 – and list also includes Chris Gayle, Ricky Ponting and Hashim Amla to name three pretty much at random – whose strike rate is over 100, meaning that over the course of his ODI career he has scored more runs than they have faced balls.
If such statistical comparisons don’t convince us that De Kock wasn’t only a stellar South African player, he was a global phenomenon, nothing will. Still, the Quinnie enigma remains. Beyond the numbers, let’s try and understand that enigma a little better, now shall we?
My relationship with Quinnie – I’m glorifying it with the world “relationship” – goes back to the winter days of 2012. I was working for Cricket South Africa at the time. Quinnie was in the national under-19 team and I had occasion to talk to the team about so dos and don’ts of talking to the media. Quinnie was respectful enough not to fall asleep.
Later I watched him in the nets of the High Performance Centre at Tukkies in Pretoria. I clearly remember him nicking off with a kind of galling nonchalance to fellow under-19 player, a polite fast bowler from the Free State called Corné Dry. As he walked back to his mark, Dry called me “Sir”, which made me want to giggle uncontrollably.
The episode – it can’t have lasted more than a few seconds – was vintage Quinnie. Most of us nick off because we’ve been undone or beaten for pace or have simply mid-judged the many things we should have judged better.
Quinnie wasn’t undone by anything Dry offered him. Instead he was undone by Quinnie. On reflection, he seemed to be saying: “I can lose my wicket here because I can – I can do anything I want, in fact. That’s me, that’s Quinnie. Here I am, in all my contrary grandeur.”
Come to think of it, “contrary grandeur” isn’t a very Quinnie-like phrase. He would have said something like: “Hey, I’m Quinnie, take it or leave it. That’s who I am and that’s how I play.” Such brazen self-belief used to drive his under-19 coach, Ray Jennings, apoplectic.
Jennings would shout and curse. He would complain about De Kock’s wicket-keeping abilities, about his lack of foot movement and what he perceived to be his take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Jennings, in fact, would complain about the entire De Kock package.
Jennings rose wonderfully and predictably to the De Kock challenge. The two fought. The more casual Jennings accused De Kock of being, the more casual De Kock became. The two of them were like goldfish in a bowl.
What De Kock was really saying, I’ll hazard, was that he wanted to be left alone to be Quinnie. In a conformist environment this is often more difficult for a coach than it sounds, I don’t think Jennings ever got it quite right. But, then again, I don’t think De Kock always got being Quinnie quite right either.
Perhaps that’s unfair. Of course Quinnie got being Quinnie right. What he might not have always got right was negotiating the other stuff. Dealing with coaches and dealing with the administrators, dealing with the very people who I suspect De Kock struggled to take seriously because they couldn’t play the game as well as he could.
In the World Cup in Queensland for which the under-19 team were then preparing, De Kock’s team reached the semi-finals. Along the way they beat Bangladesh – where De Kock scored 95 – Sri Lanka and England. That England side was decent. They had Jamie and Craig Overton, Ben Duckett and Ben Foakes, all of whom went on to play internationally.
Having beaten England in the quarter-final, South Africa played hosts Australia in the semis. Of those whose names you’ll recognise, that Aussie under-19 team had Travis Head and Cameron Bancroft, the patsy who, five years later, wandered onto Newlands with sandpaper in his pocket.
Looking back at the records, I realise that the under-19 semi-final bore an eerie resemblance to what happened between Australia and South Africa in the World Cup proper a couple of weeks ago.
Back in Townsville in 2012, South Africa batted first. The card made for disappointing reading, South Africa making 191 for eight in their 50 overs. De Kock made one and Australia – without ever looking entirely comfortable, they were two for three at one stage – reeled it in thanks to Bancroft’s 66. They won by four wickets and nine balls to spare.
In South Africa’s semi-final against Australia in the World Cup 11 years later, South Africa also batted first. Again De Kock failed. Again South Africa failed to post a truly competitive total. Again they bowled well in Australia’s chase without ever entirely convincing either themselves or the world that they were about to cause an upset.
It was another close but no koeksuster moment for South African cricket. It’s galling, isn’t it? Those koeksusters look fresh and syrupy on the other side of the room, but just as you begin to approach them they move away. You step forward and they step back. It’s rather like being caught in a dance you can never conclude, or a bad dream you can’t escape from.
There’s been social media filth, anguish and genuine disappointment as far as the semi-final loss to Australia a couple of weeks ago is concerned, so let’s address the issues in all their dripping bile.
First, De Kock failed, a shot that wasn’t to do with the vagaries of the wicket but to do with the desperation he felt as a result of Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazelwood’s nagging opening overs.
Aiden Markram wafted it square of the wicket to be caught by Warner off a thick outside edge, and Rassie van der Dussen, after a fine World Cup, was caught at second slip. Of the first four wickets to fall, the best ball of all was bowled to Temba Bavuma.
It was a delivery at which he was obliged to play from Starc and Inglis made the catch look more straightforward than I suspect it was. Bavuma has copped flak for batting after winning the toss, but you can see why he did what he did. A World Cup semi-final tends to produce – or demand – caution.
It would have needed a brave captain to follow a hunch and bowl. And had Bavuma chosen to bowl instead of bat, what was to guarantee that the strongmen of the Protea attack would use the pitch as well as the Aussies did?
Bowling second had its advantages. The wicket was more conducive to spin in the evening for a start. Had the Proteas taken their chances – two tough dropped catches to De Kock to the spinners and one to Heinrich Klaasen at first slip – it might have been a different story.
With the help of Cricket South Africa’s official statistician, Andrew Samson, I’ve pulled the statistics on win ratios between batting first and batting second. The first thing that’s relevant here is that historically – in all ODIs ever played – there is a small but discernible advantage to batting second. This makes sense. You know what you’re chasing and can pace yourself accordingly.
“On the other hand,” says Samson. “South Africa have generally had a better record batting 1st than batting 2nd and this is particularly noticeable since 2010.”
It is even more noticeable since 2020. Since 2020, the Proteas have played 48 ODIs and this includes the 2023 World Cup. In those 48 ODIs they have batted first 27 times and batted second 21 times. In the 27 matches in which they have batted first, they have won 18, with six loses and three no results. This is an average win rate of 75%.
In the 21 matches they have batted second, they have won nine and lost 11, with one no result. This averages out at a 45% win-ratio.
I must emphasise here that neither toss nor location came into the equation here. We didn’t ask, for example, what the SA skipper decided to do if he won the toss. And venue is not factored in either. We simply know that in the post-2020 period, the Proteas win 75% of their matches in ODIs batting first. This percentage slumps to 45% batting second.
Samson continues: “Only two other Test teams (Australia and Pakistan) have a better record historically batting 1st than 2nd in ODIs, and South Africa has a higher differential than the other two.”
Batting first or second aside, it would be foolish to argue that Bavuma had a good World Cup. In eight innings his highest score was 35 and he wasn’t Whatsapp-ing his mum back home messages about his strike rate either. But there are some extenuating factors. This was Bavuma’s first World Cup. He wasn’t there in 2019 when we finished seventh after early losses to England, Bangladesh and India. His record at home in ODIs in the last two years has been very good, in fact, so he deserves a little understanding and a little less vitriol.
My regret is that he wasn’t made ODI captain earlier. When he was, just over two-and-a-half years ago, the incumbent was? Well? Well, it was De Kock.
De Kock wasn’t a bad choice but Quinnie’s excellent cricket brain isn’t to be confused with his leadership skills. He, if we recall, was part of a raft of post-Faf du Plessis candidates that included Markram and, briefly, JP Duminy.
Had the selectors and those in the know decided to plump for Bavuma sooner, it would have allowed him longer to bed down, longer to impose his vision on the side and longer to establish his opening partnership with De Kock.
Now De Kock has gone, Bavuma has to begin all over again with someone else, presumably Reeza Hendricks. And he must do so from a limited base. He has only played 38 ODIs. It was less before the World Cup because Bavuma played eight matches in India. Thirty ODIs is too few for a World Cup captain.
South Africa’s World Cup was a success without being ultimately successful. They finished second out of ten teams on the log, with the second-highest net run-rate in the competition. There were some stellar performances and some match-winning ones. Keshav Maharaj’s winning runs against Pakistan; Quinnie’s 174 against Bangladesh. The 428 for five (with three centuries) in the opening game against Sri Lanka. Van der Dussen’s catching.
There were others: Kagiso Rabada’s three for 33 in the early 134-run win against the eventual champions; Klaasen’s 67-ball 109 and Marco Jansen’s 42-ball 75 against England in Mumbai. This was a match in which England could only bat for 22 overs, let’s not forget.
Historians of the future will look back on matches like this and shake their heads. What teams are capable of nowadays means that frontiers are constantly being broken, new thresholds crossed.
Yet, I have to reluctantly admit – and this from an author who brought you a book called the “Art of Losing” 11 years ago – South Africa’s World Cup “successes” only confirmed to leave us with that familiar bitterness in our mouth. It’s amazing how, as a fan, we dare not allow ourselves to hope anymore. A match like the Australia semi-final comes along and David Miller makes his special century, an innings of calm power, and suddenly you have no option but to hope the meagre total can somehow be defended.
You hope but don’t hope. You try and sneak up on your hope, or sneak around your hope. You hope without hoping. You sort-of hope. You hope against hope. You hope and hate yourself for hoping, wondering if there’s some other way to support a team which doesn’t involve such horrendous, nerve-shredding disappointment.
So, we’re obliged to hope, while trying our best not to. It’s a strange emotional no-man’s-land. And it’s easier to support the Springboks.
As Quinnie walks into the sunset, let’s hear a little bit from the man himself – in the man’s words. Two years ago, in the middle of the World T20 in the Emirates, De Kock released a press statement from Abu Dhabi. It was about the new CSA board’s insistence that the team take the knee after De Kock and his team-mates had been led to believe that these things were optional. De Kock was so aghast at the instruction that he missed the game against the West Indies, if you remember, but went on to play his part in the tournament after an air-clearing, emotional online meeting with members of the CSA board.
One of the more revealing passages in the De Kock statement – a statement, incidentally, that he appeared to write himself – was the following: “I’ve been called a lot of things as a cricketer. Doff. Stupid. Selfish. Immature. But those didn’t hurt. Being called a racist because of a misunderstanding hurts me deeply. It hurts my family. It hurts my pregnant wife. I am not a racist. In my heart of hearts, I know that. And I think those who know me know that.”
So there we have it. De Kock was further irritated that the board’s decision for an anti-racist gesture from the team happened on the morning of the West Indies match. The De Kock statement two days later appeared to clear the air. He felt heard and the kerfuffle went away. Yet did it go away completely? De Kock wanted nothing more than to be left alone by administrators he neither cared for nor cared to understand. I can’t be entirely sure, but finally I would guess that it was board interventions such as this one two years ago that made his decision to walk away aged 30 just that little easier. He will argue that he did so in good conscience. Four centuries in a World Cup. That’s a great haul in anyone’s language.
A couple of days after I went along to talk to the under-19 team before their departure for the World Cup, the team had their capping ceremony and farewell dinner. My wife and I attended. The team were asked to put on the entertainment between courses. Quinnie dressed up as Michael Jackson. He danced his way through a song from Thriller. He was a little self-conscious and not very good but we all appreciated the sentiment. He was a thriller until the very end, Quinnie, an absolute thriller. We’ll miss you Quinnie, we really will.