There is a theory going about that discounts the efficacy, the reality even, of innate talent in achieving expertise. Two of its most well known exponents are journalist Malcolm Gladwell, whose book on the subject, Outliers, is a huge bestseller and generated much conversation the world over, and Matthew Syed, journalist and former English Table Tennis player who authored Bounce: The myth of talent and the power of practice.
Very loosely stated, the theory argues that there is really no such thing as talent, and world-class proficiency in a given field is gained through 10,000 hours of purposeful practice. In other words (and since this article is about cricket), Brian Lara, Donald Bradman, and Sachin Tendulkar were not bequeathed special gifts that allowed them to be better than almost everyone who ever held a bat; they reached their exalted levels after hours and hours of meaningful practice.
Undoubtedly, there is some merit to the idea. As a boy in Bowral, Bradman spent hours bouncing a golf ball against a tank and playing it with a stump, while the young Brian Lara would bat for days while playing cricket with his friends in Santa Cruz, Trinidad, to give just two examples. That kind of assiduousness helped propel them to greatness. But that's not the whole story.
It is difficult to accept that talent is nonexistent. That there are persons gifted with raw material that permits them to excel more than others is evident, at least in my view. Take the case of Curtly Ambrose: the 6'7" Antiguan played his first serious game of cricket at the age of 21 representing his village, Swetes. Prior to that he played mostly football and basketball, engaging in cricket occasionally and only as a favour to his friends who thought he could bowl. Nonetheless at 24 he was playing for the West Indies alongside Malcolm Marshall and Courtney Walsh. No 10,000 hours practice for him; he was born to bowl fast and cricket was lucky to have found him.
Another cricketer who must have been blessed by the sporting gods is South African One Day International (ODI) captain AB de Villiers. Few would dispute him being the best all-round batsman in the game, playing tests, ODIs and the Twenty20 variety with equal facility. And while he would have worked hard at honing his skills over the years, it requires only a brief viewing of him batting or fielding or keeping wicket to realize he is exceptionally skilled.
Somehow, de Villiers found the time to excel in an unheard of number of sports as a youngster. He held junior records in swimming and sprinting; was a high-ranking junior badminton and tennis player; had a scratch handicap in golf; and was especially good at rugby and hockey. It is our good fortune that he stuck with cricket, for he had a wide variety of sports to choose from.
I feel like I jumped aboard the AB de Villiers bandwagon rather late. I had always known he was a good player, but was somewhat on the fence concerning his specialness as a batsman. And it was not until South Africa's Group B match against the West Indies in the 2011 World Cup that the light came on.
In particular it was two cover-drives early in his innings that triggered my appreciation of his quality. South Africa had lost two early wickets responding to the West Indies' 222 when de Villiers arrived to join Graeme Smith. Within four deliveries he unfurled two of the most attractive shots one could ever hope to see; two shots that got me off the fence and out of my armchair. From that moment it didn't matter whether my team (West Indies) won or lost; this was a time to put aside parochial considerations and enjoy the masterpiece that was being fashioned before my eyes. When victory came for South Africa he was undefeated on 107.
De Villiers' innings of 91 at Centurion during Australias 2013/14 visit to South Africa tells the tale of a man who was ahead of his peers. Mitchell Johnson, as quick and as brutal as any bowler has ever been, had blown away England like a tornado in the preceding Ashes series, and here, in the first test, the left-handed pacer seemed even more powerful than he was against the Englishmen. Yet, as Johnson's winds were uprooting everything around him de Villiers never took a backward step, scoring a battling 91 amid the destruction. The next highest score was JP Duminy's 25. Australia won the test, and Johnson claimed 12 wickets in the game, but de Villiers stood like a lone edifice in a sea of devastation.
A few weeks ago, January 18th to be exact, de Villiers violently grabbed the headlines by scoring the fastest 50 (16 balls) and the fastest century (31 balls) in ODI history. The victims were the West Indies' bowlers, but that was only because they were the ones unlucky enough to be bowling to him that day. Any other attack would have been similarly mauled. His eventual 149 came off just 44 deliveries and contained nine fours and 16 sixes, and it didn't matter what the hapless West Indians did or tried to do.
There were no good or bad deliveries; whatever they served up was fuel to allow de Villiers' fire to rage. His dissection of the bowling was, in equal measure, classy and cold-blooded, and recalled a line that RC Robertson-Glasgow wrote of Donald Bradman: "Poetry and murder lived in him together."
The cricket world's gaze is now turned towards Australia and New Zealand for the ICC 2015 Cricket World Cup. In this era of batting brutality there will be no shortage of thrills. Indeed, we have already seen some fireworks from Darren Sammy, David Miller, Brendon McCallum, Aaron Finch, Lendl Simmons, Ed Joyce and others. The carnival of exhilarating batting will undoubtedly, and will be joined at some point by de Villiers. Though he featured in a rather spectacular run-out with a direct hit from mid-off, he had a quiet first game against Zimbabwe, scoring only 25. Teams still to play South Africa may wish that he remains silent but it is almost a given that his blade will soon be amongst the noisiest around.
There are a number of teams, Australia, India, New Zealand among them, that could realistically win the big prize. But my favourites are the South Africans, despite the ever-present charges of them being chokers. I fancy their chances because they have a very good all-round team that will be comfortable in the conditions. But it is also because they have the game's best batsman in their ranks. Any team wanting to get past South Africa will have to first get past AB de Villiers. And that will be a most difficult undertaking.
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