AB de Villiers was everything to all people

The job of the sportswriter is to glorify sport. It is to elevate the simple act of a bat hitting a ball at just the right angle to something greater, to something worthy of capturing the imagination of a billion people. 

To do this is not easy, and so sportswriters search for meaning beyond the simple ebb and flow of a well-played session. We search for metaphor. We call cricket stadiums modern-day gladiatorial arenas. Cricketers are combatants. Sport is modern-day war. It’s a natural comparison to make, and I’m guilty of having made it myself in the past. I do not, however, think it is necessarily the correct one all the time.

It was especially not the correct one whenever Abraham Benjamin de Villiers occupied the crease. When he came out to bat, sport was not war. Sport was joy.

Was joy. It pains my heart to write that. With his retirement – and I say this fully conscious of how dramatic it sounds – something ephemeral has forever left cricket. It is a well-worn cliché to say that we shall never see someone’s like again when they retire – each cricketer, after all, is unique, and the cricket connoisseur will undoubtedly find something distinctive about each cricketer. Everyone brings their own brand of passion, their own stance, their own slightly-odd trigger movement. 

But these distinctions tend to usually be distinctions in form, not in spirit. It would take a blind man indeed to not see the direct line connecting Len Hutton to Ken Barrington to Alastair Cook, or indeed Victor Trumper to Virender Sehwag. Cook, head bent low, was the obdurate spirit of Len Hutton exemplified. Every movement Sehwag made channeled Trumper, channeled a simpler time when nobody cared about the counting stats. Each shot they played reminded the viewer that they were watching a batsman with singular gifts who cared not one whit about patience, strategy, or risk assessment. 

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Except for when they don’t.

Every once in a long time comes someone that is so new, so utterly novel that he has no true spiritual predecessor. The last cricketer who made me feel this was Adam Gilchrist, who revolutionized the role of wicketkeeper so completely that every wicketkeeper that now wishes to play at a professional level likely curses him. I hold him personally responsible for sabotaging Wriddhiman Saha’s career; Saha, in a pre-Gilchrist era, is Jack Russell. 

AB de Villiers, like Gilchrist, has no spiritual successor. It is easy to pigeonhole him with the other cavaliers, the dashers, the ones people came to watch play. He was all of those things, perhaps more than anyone else has ever been. The shots that he dared to play – there is no predecessor, absolutely no one.

There were times when it felt like he was playing on a pitch different from anyone else, putting a bat to a larger ball than was being bowled to anyone else. He hit the ball to places it had never been hit before. Just as Stephen Curry redefined the geometry of the basketball court, AB redefined the geometry of the cricket field. Every batsman from KS Ranjitsinhji has played the same sport. With every yorker AB scooped over the top of the wicketkeeper’s head, you could feel cricket change a little.

I grew up trying to bat the same way my father grew up trying to bat, and my father grew up trying to bat the same way his father grew up trying to bat. My child will learn to play cricket in a post-AB world. He will grow up trying to bat differently. 

AB was also, however, a man who would face 300 balls and bat at a strike rate of 14 in the desperate hope of snatching a draw from the jaws of certain defeat. That match, of course, was finally lost, which makes the innings even more reminiscent of Gavaskar and Boycott than it anyway was. There is, in fact, a fair argument to be made that he found more success in long-form cricket than in short-form cricket. Where, then, does that leave us? 

Every generation finds its own idol. Each idol represents that generation’s aspirations, its values. Sometimes a sportswriter doesn’t need to do much work to help capture the public’s imagination – a Sourav Ganguly did that all on his own. But equally, the next generation casts down these idols and chooses its own. MS Dhoni replaced Sourav Ganguly. Virat Kohli replaced MS Dhoni. Different personalities, different fans. And while there is usually grudging respect, it is rare that someone who worships one will also pray at the altar of the other – after all, is it even possible to define one without juxtaposing them with the other?

And this brings us back to AB de Villiers. Those who left school early to watch Barry Richards’ shotmaking can see him in AB de Villiers. Those who grew up loving the defiance of Jacques Kallis can see him in AB de Villiers too. And perhaps above all else, those aesthetes who saw Brian Lara bat and swore to never love a player as they did him ever again can shift their allegiances a little. 

AB de Villiers was everything to all people. He transcended generations and gave many of us who were growing older and had less time than we used to reason to switch on the television one more time. We knew that as long as he was at the crease, there existed infinite possibilities. The match was never lost, and even if it was there was always the chance to witness moments of surpassing beauty.

After all, above all else, AB de Villiers was joy.

– By Kaustubh Chaturvedi (kaustubhchaturvedi@nls.ac.in)