Cricket World Cup: Before he bids farewell to ODIs, an unburdened Quinton de Kock rediscovers his best form with back-to-back hundreds | Cricket-world-cup News

Sometime during the peak of the pandemic, Quinton de Kock lost his love for the game. The ceaseless bio-bubble-hopping knackered his mind. The burden of all-format captaincy too weighed on his mind. He was expecting his first child, and missed the family.“There are a lot of nerves that go around when it comes to the bubble – lots of small things get into your mind; things that you’re not used to in life,” he confessed during a Test against Sri Lanka. He decided to take a mental-health break from the game. A few months earlier, he had refused to take a knee in the T20 World Cup and left the team.
De Kock would, inevitably, make a comeback. But nothing seemed the same, he seemed detached from the game, his mind seemed floating elsewhere, and he was a shadow of the wicketkeeper- batsman he once was. His form plummeted, his stocks in franchise-cricket crashed, he quit Test cricket, and seemed suddenly invisible, an outlier. He suddenly felt cricket all-consuming, eating away into the time he spent with his family as well his favourite pastime, fishing, his catches splashed all over his social-media accounts. His Physical Education teacher Eugene Marx at King Edward VII School in Johannesburg would once tell this paper that “he is essentially a simple, country boy, who just happened to be a supreme athlete.”

Fame and attention did not intoxicate him. Sport was not an obsession — just as much as he loved the game, he loved life outside it too. Four years ago, de Kock and fishing buddy Dale Steyn back-packed to Tsimane, a fishing haunt 250-odd kilometres from Bolivia’s capital La Paz and tucked in the Bolivian National Park, where the Amazon jungle meets the Andes Mountains. All in search of the elusive Golden Dorado, a fish so sparkling in yellow that it seems carved out of gold. When not fishing, De Kock’s bow-hunting in the bushes. In the video titled ‘Setshaba Safaris’, he’s seen piercing a dart through the lungs of a nyala, of the antelope family. Later, he’s seen barbecuing his catch.
There, thus, was a casualness that was sometimes misinterpreted as scattered attention from the game. When he announced his retirement from Test cricket, he was branded a T20 mercenary, someone who put money over country. But only De Kock knew the strain the game was putting on his mind and body.
“I am 30, I already feel like 40.” Batting, ‘keeping, captaining, opening, globe-trotting, everything was taking a toll.
So he said he would quit the 50-over format too after the World Cup. He made a frank admission too: “T20 events – I am not going to deny that there is a lot of money and coming to the end of your career, guys want to get their final top-up before their career finishes.”

Perhaps the admission unburdened him, even made him fall in love with the game again. This World Cup, De Kock has batted as smoothly as he ever has in his career. It’s just like how he started his career, with four centuries in his first year. He has seldom looked so effortless. Over time, the languidness of his drives and cuts were overshadowed the brutality of his leg-side game, lost in the pull, shoves, shovels and heaves through the leg-side that IPL audiences would vouch for.
Back in his element
But this World Cup, he has discovered the timing, the soft brushes of his vintage bat. Two strokes embodied it — one a delicate cut off Josh Hazlewood and then a pull off Pat Cummins over fine-leg. For the cut, he just stood in his crease, opened up his body a fraction and then just dabbed it through third man. The bat did not make any violent flaps, the body was still, bereft of contortions, and the feet moved minimally. It was just those pliant hands that rode the bounce and diverted the ball to the fence.

Later, De Kock de-brutalised the pull. The angle was difficult, the ball landing on leg-stump and searing into his body. It was an awkward angle, even on this placid surface. But he just shifted sideways to get inside the line of the ball, arched his body a bit and pulled it imperiously, lifting his right knee just a wee bit from the ground. There was hardly any swivel — the beauty of the stroke was that he did not swivel — or an exaggerated follow-through.Most Read
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In both hundreds of his in this World Cup, it’s the minimalism of his strokes that has stood out. One doesn’t find him reaching for the ball, manufacturing strokes or conceding an impression that he is trying too hard. He would then essay a gorgeous drive on the rise off Adam Zampa. It was marginally full, but De Kock just extended his front foot and pushed him through the covers. It was like the leading vocals of a rock band reciting heart-melting shaayari in its spiritual home.

In the middle, he was serene, his movements precise, judgment definite. An unreal amount of time seemed to be at his disposal. He executed a reverse-sweep off Zampa’s bowling that looked barely premeditated. It was just when the ball descended that he flipped around, in swift, neat moments. When he controlled proceedings, Australia looked like flash-lit-rabbits, and could only applaud him when he completed his hundred with a whiplash leg-side club, one rare stroke of brutal brilliance. Of no less a bowler than Cummins. The celebrations were quiet, a warm smile and a gentle wave of the bat.
After the Sri Lanka hundred, he had said: “It was big not just because it was a World Cup, but because I’ve been wanting a hundred for a while.” He had not scored one in 20 months before the one against Sri Lanka. He now has two in as many games, and rediscovered the love for the game, before he bids farewell to the format.