South Africa's revolutionary: The 360 batsman who could do it all

In the post-isolation Nineties, a certain kind of stoicism marked South African batsmanship. It was as if the years in the sporting wilderness had taken such a toll that the only rightful response to readmission was to spread layers of grit over the past.

There was, then, Kepler Wessels, South Africa’s first captain after readmission, who essentially oversaw the transition by chewing gum, wearing a few and batting all day. The message: after 22 years in the wilds, you make it count. The arch-grafter Gary Kirsten would soon be following suit; as would Hansie Cronje and latterly Graeme Smith. Even Jacques Kallis, the great insatiable stylist, seemed invariably caught up in matters of duty, honour and affairs of state.

The grand outlier in all this, of course, was the gifted dasher Herschelle Gibbs, but his became a story of what might have been if he hadn’t played a little too fast and a little too loose.

The genius of Abraham Benjamin de Villiers was that he combined the lot. He was at once fearsomely modern, the batsman of his era, and as old as the hills.

He could bat long – once grafting for 246 minutes against Australia without bothering the boundary rope. He could bat imperiously, as evidenced in his most recent and now final Test century at Port Elizabeth against the same opposition; and of course, when he fancied it, AB could go berserk.

Since his international debut in 2004 – selected, quaintly, in the guise of a solid opening bat next to Smith – no player in world cricket has better articulated the dizzying new vocabulary of scoops, ramps, paddles, 360° and all the rest of it.

His fielding meanwhile is not so much from another era as a different sphere altogether. And yet even here, in his barely human feats at midwicket and backward point, atavistic echoes of that other South African tradition, from Colin Bland to Jonty Rhodes, of the lithe trapeze artist lurking in the covers.

His athletic ability is legendary. If cricket hadn’t taken him, then any one of rugby, golf, hockey or tiddlywinks would have hungrily signed him up instead.

In a country of sporting polymaths, AB is professor emeritus.

Everyone will have their own favourite memory. Ask Virat Kohli, and he may plump for AB’s freakish grab on the square-leg boundary last week. Certainly, if Kohli’s stunned reaction is anything to go by. Cricketers of even Kohli’s stature bow down to the man who can do everything.

This writer’s personal favourite came in England at the end of the 2008 series. He’d been irrepressible that summer, making 174 at Leeds in the pivotal Test, one that South Africa would win, and with it the series. That knock was played against a backdrop of feistiness, as the normally gracious English crowd took exception to what they perceived as de Villiers’ claiming a bump-ball catch earlier in the piece.

But if that innings demonstrated his cussedness, his turn at The Oval would embody one of the many other sides of AB de Villiers. I was there that day. He would make 97 of the purest, most joyous runs I’ve ever seen.

His departure, three runs from three figures, bowled making room against Monty Panesar to hit him through the legside, merely captured the spirit of the show.

An hour or two later, at the close of play, he was interviewed on TV. Still beaming, utterly unbothered by the unreached milestone, he said, and I’ll never forget it: “Yah, delighted, played out of my boots out there!”

I loved that line. There was not the slightest tinge of arrogance or self-aggrandisement in the statement. What came across instead was love: for the game, for the contest, for the stage.

And now the stage, at international level at least, will be cleared. AB de Villiers has announced that his race is run. To many it will come as something of a shock. He had only recently returned to Test cricket, following a sabbatical from the five-day game. That magisterial masterclass at Port Elizabeth against Australia, 126*, by far the largest score of the match, seemed to the outside eye to herald a new moment in the man’s career, while serving as vindication of his decision to step away for a time, “to find that energy again that I’d lost”, as he told Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine in January.

That innings at PE will now have to serve as valediction, as much as validation. “I’d like to retire while still playing decent cricket,” he said. “After the fantastic series wins against India and Australia, it feels like the right time to step aside.”

There is no such thing as the perfect time to go. There is always more to do. He will never get to lift a world title with South Africa. But after the best part of 15 years at the coalface, during which he played 100 consecutive Test matches, helping South Africa become the No.1 Test side in the game and a string of otherworldly performances in green (and pink – who can forget his 44-ball 149 against the West Indies at Johannesburg on Breast Cancer Awareness Day in 2015?), the great entertainer has earned the right to choose the manner of his departure.

And in the end, of course, it’s not so much about trinkets and trophies as the way you made them feel. The great Indian batsman Virender Sehwag, not usually given to displays of hyperbole, was one of the many joining the chorus when the announcement was made. “The most loved cricketer in the world”, he wrote. Few will argue with that.