by Tim Wigmore
‘He is just a pure athlete,’ Billings observed. ‘It combines a lot of different sports . . . I really like that raw ability and raw athleticism in how he plays. A bit uncoached in a way.’
The temerity of his shots earned de Villiers a simple nickname: ‘Mr 360’. Most nicknames are mocking; his is reverential, infused with awe at a transcendent talent. De Villiers was equally adept reverse-scooping a yorker over extra cover for six, or ramping a 90 mph delivery over the wicketkeeper, as he is thrashing a cover drive.
‘How many shots should you have? The simple answer is: all of them,’ Bob Woolmer, the celebrated cricket coach, wrote in Bob Woolmer’s Art and Science of Cricket, published posthumously in 2008. De Villiers represented the fulfilment of Woolmer’s vision.
Yet Woolmer had also warned of the perils of choosing shots for show, rather than effectiveness: ‘Too many batsmen fail because they play all the shots all the time.’ While some players with an astounding repertoire of shots can use them ostentatiously, seeming to prioritise extravagance over effectiveness, with de Villiers, it was purely business-like, picking the most efficient way to score the maximum amount of runs from any ball.
As bats have become more imposing, batsmen more athletic and resourceful and boundaries shorter, bowlers clung on to one remaining advantage. At least they knew where the batsman was going to be.
De Villiers recognised this one remaining asset and inverted it. He developed a method in which he could move around with such suppleness, making late, decisive movements – towards the bowler or moving back deeper in his crease; across his stumps to the off side, or backing away to the leg side – that the bowler was deprived of any real clue about where he would be when the ball landed. Often, he would just bluff, shimmying around the crease, disorientating the bowler and yet actually meeting the ball in an orthodox position.
Like no other batsman in history, de Villiers weaponised his batting stance, turning it into another tool to enfeeble bowlers. ‘The era of batsmen reacting to bowlers is over. From here on, bowlers react to batsmen,’ the South African author Tom Eaton wrote of de Villiers for the Cricket Monthly.
‘You get guys who are good, then you get guys who are excellent, then you get A.B. de Villiers,’ his long-time South African teammate Dale Steyn once gushed, calling de Villiers ‘limitless’. Steyn has not only learned this over 14 years bowling to de Villiers in the nets, and watching him in international games. He has also learned from his own tussles with de Villiers in the IPL, and two clashes that transcended the normal humdrum of IPL group matches.
The first time, in 2012, Steyn came on to bowl defending 39 from 18 balls. The first ball was dropped a little short outside off stump, and de Villiers pulled it over midwicket for six. The second was a yorker speared into leg stump, which de Villiers still flicked for two. The third, on a full length outside off stump, was smeared through midwicket as de Villiers went down on one knee. To the fourth, a yorker on middle stump, de Villiers backed away, exposing all three of his stumps – and thumped the ball over extra cover for six. To Steyn’s fifth ball, pushed outside off stump to prevent a repeat, now de Villiers moved the other way – going so far to the off side, that he exposed all three stumps again. Down on one knee, de Villiers scooped a 90 mph delivery over fine leg for four. All that was left was to take a single off the final ball, taking it to 23 off the over and ensuring that de Villiers would be on strike for the next over to finish the job.
The next time the two met at a decisive juncture in an IPL match, in 2014, Steyn returned to bowl defending 28 from 12 balls, sensing the chance of revenge. He began with an off-cutter that moved into de Villiers: six, over square leg. Then a full ball outside off stump: another six, this time straight. A leg bye followed, before a single to return the strike to de Villiers, with 14 more to win from eight balls. Steyn tried a leg-cutter: de Villiers eviscerated it through long off for four. Then, the best of the lot: Steyn tried a yorker outside off stump. De Villiers went down on one knee, and scooped the ball over fine leg and into the second tier of the stands. De Villiers had scored 23 from a Steyn over again, though this time he did so from only five balls. All that Steyn could do was clap.
For de Villiers, these overs were the moments when the full scope of his talent came into view – the moments when he realised just what he could do. Reflecting on those takedowns of Steyn, he said: ‘I’ve started really loving those kinds of situations where you need 12 or 13 an over and the best bowler in the world’s bowling and how can you create something from nothing? Where it puts him under so much pressure that he starts making mistakes. And then that’s where I started creating those types of shots, just sort of trying to stay a step or two ahead of the bowler, and putting him under pressure.
‘It’s not really a technical thing, but a mental switch, where you start believing and start having confidence that you can pull anything off from any situation. And once you cross the line once or twice like that, you really start believing that you can do it more often.’
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In the 1950s, the English football manager Charles Reep became the first man to systematically record statistics on matches. He came to a startling conclusion: most goals came from moves of three passes or fewer. From this fact came an entire theory of how to play the game: booting the ball up the field, and adhering to Reep’s mantra – ‘not more than three passes’. The trouble was, Reep’s research had a fatal flaw. While most goals indeed came from passes of three or fewer, this was because football is a game in which possession is turned over very quickly. He was oblivious to two findings that would only emerge decades later, and invalidated the long-ball theory. First, passes closer to goal had much more chance of leading to a goal than punts from within a team’s own half. And second, while long-passing moves led to fewer goals, this was because they were rarer; a move actually gained a higher chance of leading to a goal as it grew longer.
The lessons of Reep remain as important as ever: using data smartly in sport is never easy, and being too fixated on data can leave teams worse off than if they ignored it altogether.
The onset of big data in sport has made most teams far shrewder. But it has also led to some overreacting to small sample sizes, driving them to make suboptimal decisions. Perhaps this is the best reason for the curious case of de Villiers’ T20 international career, which yielded an average of 26.12 and strike rate of 135.16 across 78 games; still useful enough, especially considering he would often come in late in the innings, but meagre set against his record in the IPL where he scored 4,395 runs at an average of 43.08 and a strike rate of 151.23 until the end of 2019.
In the semi-finals of the T20 World Cup in 2014, South Africa were batting first against India. De Villiers did not arrive at the crease until the last ball of the 14th over. So one of the finest T20 batsmen in the world was reduced to being used as a finisher, a player to apply pizzazz at the death rather than shape an innings. Data was to blame.
After South Africa’s defeat, head coach Russell Domingo justified why the team had held de Villiers back, both against India and earlier in the tournament. ‘A.B. has batted at three a few times and has had limited success. It’s not the number he bats, it’s the situation of the game when he comes in,’ Domingo explained. De Villiers’ batting position, Domingo said, had been based on statistics showing that he was far more effective coming in after the tenth over. South Africa planned to send de Villiers out only when the first wicket fell in the second half of the innings.
This theory was endorsed by numbers. The trouble was, the sample size was tiny. When Domingo said de Villiers thrived coming in late in an innings, he was referring to eight innings played over eight years. South Africa overinterpreted the findings of a small amount of data. In doing so, they ignored how players – especially those as great as de Villiers – evolve. Many analysts consider data that is over two years old obsolete, so swiftly is T20 evolving.
De Villiers’ struggles in international T20 cricket also refle
cted the curious position occupied by the international game in T20. Besides the T20 World Cup, much international cricket is defined by substandard teams – with many leading players rested – playing games that are no more than friendlies. After the 2014 WT20, de Villiers went 15 months until his next T20 international, denied the intensive period of concentrating on the format and his role within a side that he is afforded during the IPL. Throughout his international career he only played in 41 matches outside the T20 World Cup – a puny four matches a year – partly because he was often rested.
‘I haven’t really found a rhythm yet in T20,’ he said in 2013. ‘I’m still finding my way . . . exactly where I’m going to bat, whether I’m a finisher, in the middle order or in the top three, maybe.’
South Africa spent his whole T20 international career trying to work out the answer, even as de Villiers evolved into the most prized wicket in the IPL. During his entire international career, de Villiers never batted more than six matches in the same position.
‘We decided on A.B. at the top a while ago, and to change that would be a sign of panic,’ declared captain Faf du Plessis before the 2016 T20 World Cup. But two games after a 29-ball 71 opening against England, de Villiers was shunted to a roving brief in the middle order. For all his staggering achievements in both Test and one-day international cricket, de Villiers was wasted by South Africa in T20.
Because de Villiers’ gifts were so effervescent, sides were tempted to use him as an elite-level utility player, reasoning that he was capable of concealing any weakness in their batting order. It was not until 2015, when he was already 31, that de Villiers began to lord over T20 with quite the same regal air as he did Tests and ODI cricket. What changed was not his game – he had also been a batsman of staggering repertoire and chutzpah – but how he was able to declutter his approach.
That was because of being given role clarity. After years of oscillating between positions, de Villiers now had a settled role. Between the end of the 2016 World Cup and the end of 2018, de Villiers batted in 64 innings; in all but one he batted at three or four. Finally he was empowered to make full use of his gifts, rather than try to cover up the frailties of others. The years ahead were marked by de Villiers managing the audacious feat of scoring both ever more quickly and ever more consistently, exploring the outer limits of batting’s possibilities. In this period at number three and four de Villiers scored 2,414 runs at an average of 46.45 and an astonishing run rate of 9.82 runs per over, passing 50 a scarcely believable 23 times. More than one in five of the balls he faced went for a boundary, but less than one in three was a dot ball.
Compared to bowling even at Gayle, ‘A.B. is far tougher,’ said a figure who was involved in strategy for several IPL teams. ‘He is great against both pace and spin, but relatively better against pace.’ The best method, the strategist suggested, was to try to bowl left-arm spin to de Villiers at the start of his innings. If de Villiers survived that, he said, ‘Then you can only pray.’
All the while, de Villiers provided affirmation that, for all the moves to specialism, six-hitting training and players bulking up, what T20 rewards more than everything is brilliant batsmanship, just refined for a new age. Batsmanship will continue to evolve, but de Villiers has done more than anyone else to map its trajectory.
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Naturally, de Villiers inspired a legion of followers to try to imitate his style in T20. None have been more successful than England’s Jos Buttler, who ostentatiously tries to learn from de Villiers’ method.
‘For me he’s one of the best ever to play the game – and the most complete batsman across all the formats,’ Buttler said. ‘It’s natural to just look at guys like him and try and watch what they do, the shots they can play and the decisions they make at certain times. He’s a natural guy to look at as a great example for everyone who’s trying to improve as a player.
‘It’s the range of shots at his disposal which makes him so hard to bowl at. You play against him and you watch him on TV and he seems to know what the bowler’s going to bowl all the time – reads the game incredibly well. It’s having lots of options and also the selection of when to use which option and choosing the right balls, which seems to be second to none.’
The similarities between Buttler and de Villiers extend way beyond their actual batsmanship. Both had elder brothers – one in Buttler’s case and two in de Villiers’ – and were both the youngest children. Having older siblings significantly increases the chances of an athlete making it to the top, in cricket and beyond, because it builds a child’s resilience, gets them used to playing with more physically developed opponents, and means they are more likely to have unstructured play at a younger age. ‘On a very primal level you’re always running to keep up,’ explained Raph Brandon, the ECB’s head of science, medicine and innovation. De Villiers would later recall that his brothers ‘would try to intimidate me’.
Younger siblings are generally less likely to accept things as they are, and more likely to challenge conventions. A remarkable finding, recounted in Adam Grant’s book Originals, is that younger brothers are ten times more likely than their older brothers to attempt to steal a base in baseball. Perhaps something of this spirit, and this freedom to challenge the status quo, can be found in the dazzling creativity of de Villiers and Buttler.
As children, both Buttler and de Villiers benefited from multisport upbringings. For all the tendency of parents to encourage their children to specialise in one sport alone – so-called ‘tiger parenting’, inspired by the notion that reaching the pinnacle of sport requires 10,000 hours of purposeful practice – research has shown that most children are better off playing a range of sports until deep into their teens. Doing so aids children’s motor development, allows them to retain the basic joy of playing sport, reduces the risk of physical and mental fatigue, and helps them unconsciously take skills learned in one game into another.
‘It’s invaluable, the kind of experience I picked up there, about how to handle pressure and how to manage my own space in preparing for the tournament,’ de Villiers said of his extensive time spent playing golf, rugby and especially tennis in his youth. For hours at a time, he used to hit a tennis ball against a wall at home. ‘I often speak about tennis being one of the most important sports when I was growing up, for my hand-eye coordination and quick feet.’ The de Villiers flick for six over long on evokes the topspin forehands that he used as a child to defeat Kevin Anderson, who would later be ranked number five in the world.
Buttler extensively played other sports as a child too, above all hockey – which encouraged him to develop his ramp shot – and squash. To see him whip the ball through point is to see a hint of the squash that Buttler played proficiently. After hitting a remarkable 150 in a one-day international in the Caribbean in February 2019, when he needed just 34 balls to vault from 45 to 150, Buttler said that the way he strikes the ball ‘does feel like a golf swing in the way you time it’.
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Engraved in black pen at the top of Buttler’s bat are two words: ‘f*** it’. They act as a reminder to Buttler – whatever the format and whatever the colour of the ball – to play as he wants to, not as someone else’s idea of what a batsman should do.
While Buttler’s overall output across cricket’s three international formats remains far off de Villiers’, despite a highly encouraging return to Test cricket in 2018, in T20 he has, in some senses, evolved batting even from de Villiers. Buttler’s audacity to change his technique and stance after every ball surpasses even that of de Villiers.
At the very start of his innings – including from his first ball – Buttler likes to use his feet to charge down the wicket to seam bowlers. ‘I feel walking at the bowler just gets me going a bit and gets me into the contest.’ Buttler finds this can negate opponents’ plans to dismiss him. ‘I know guys a lot of the time will try and get me out by nicking me off outside off stump and sometimes they put a slip in and take that guy from midwicket.’
The intent at the start of his innings sets the template for how Buttler uses his feet and batting stance as a weapon, to open up new parts of the field and disorientate the bowlers. ‘You try and put bowlers under pressure as much as you can. I like to move around the crease as much as possible to create angles – if someone sets a wide yorker field, for me it doesn’t really make sense to stand in front of your stumps. You may as well move over there. If someone then bowls at your stumps, then fair play to the bowler for being brave enough to do it but I think if you then move into that position you then give a bowler a decision to make while he’s running up or at the point of delivery. Hopefully then as a batter you put them under more pressure which makes it harder for them to execute.
‘If someone is bowling wide yorkers – to me it just makes sense to step into the line a bit. And then if they do come straight I try and back myself to hit it and get off strike.’
There is an essential intrepid spirit to Buttler, a cricketer completely unencumbered by batting conventions: ‘That’s a real fun part of the game – trying things and having that mentality of just playing around.’ His training methods – ‘exploration stuff in the nets, just trying to work out how can I get a ball in different areas’ – are tailored towards constantly increasing the options he has to any given ball. One development in his game has been his ease changing his grip from ball to ball, moving around his hands subtly in a way that is particularly well equipped to deal with a certain delivery.
‘A lot of the time for me especially, always closing the face of the bat – sometimes you can hit the inside half a lot. Why don’t I just change my grip and open the blade up which would hopefully keep it on plane for longer? And if you want to access the off side more, opening that same swing – the ball will deviate in a different direction. Same if I close the bat face down, so they’re the fun bits of the game. Just playing around and seeing what does and doesn’t work.’