A B de Villiers

The five best batsmen over the next five years

The big names are generally old bastards. Who’s next?

Ross Taylor, New Zealand, age 25

Ross Taylor tends to look like he’s the man who’s going to win the match for New Zealand shortly before doing something slightly spacky. Pretty soon those fifties will become hundreds and those hundreds will become double hundreds.

JP Duminy, South Africa, 25

Duminy has barely started in Test cricket, but has the reassuring habit of being exceptional whatever the format. Twenty20’s just for sloggers, is it? Then why is Duminy so effective. The best batsmen are generally the best batsmen in all forms of the game.

AB de Villiers, South Africa, 25

Yes, he is only 25. There are already bowlers in world cricket who’d sooner try and insert a bat handle into their urethra than bowl at vehement letter-C denier, AB de Villiers.

Michael Clarke, Australia, 28

Recently voted ‘most overrated player’ by readers of the Herald Sun, Michael Clarke must be rated really, really, phenomenally highly. Quite clearly following in the footsteps of Border, Waugh and Ponting as an Aussie captain who’s mint with the bat.

Gautam Gambhir, India, 28

Test average after 18 Tests: 36, with one hundred. Test average in the next nine Tests: 94, with seven hundreds. Gautam Gambhir is up and running.

AB de Villiers in un-ace shocker

You all thought that AB de Villiers was ace at everything. He isn’t.

Roscoe drew our attention to Show Them Who You Are, a single on which AB sings and plays guitar. You can download it via the homepage of his website. Roscoe rather generously gave it 1/10.

Apparently someone phoned up a South African radio station to tell them that the single made them feel proud to be South African. We asked Roscoe if the song made him proud to be South African.

“Nah, the song is pretty lame. It’s like a poor version of Bon Jovi, only with weird, South African/Australian pronunciation of words. I feel the opposite of proud. I feel ashamed that someone let him get away with lyrics that sound like they were written by Oprah. Maybe the producers were too busy guffawing into their hands to object. Either that or he signed autographs to make them stop laughing.”

He goes on to say that he’s a little bitter that AB’s band will get more airplay than his, so maybe you could listen to some of Roscoe’s music to balance things out a bit.

“I love cricket and I continue to play it at club level. I’m a left arm medium-fast bowler and I come in at number six with a few big shots. I’m also a musician and I continue to play rock music at (night)club level. I’m a right hand lead guitar/singer and I come in at about 11pm to down a few big shots of Jack Daniels.”

Roscoe did try to get an interview with the guy who co-wrote the song with AB, but said it was for King Cricket so never really got an answer. That’s the power of this website right there, people.

AB de Villiers follows Graeme Smith

South Africa could never have chased down 414 without a hundred from Graeme Smith. After he was out for 108, they couldn’t have won without a hundred from AB de Villiers.

What’s really impressed us about this South African win is not that they chased down such a huge total on the final day, or that they did it against what is nominally the best side in the world. (Interesting appearance of the word ‘nominally’ there, eh?).

What’s most impressive is that they managed to fight back so comprehensively after Mitchell Johnson’s spell of five wickets for five runs earlier in the match. A team should be pretty damn dispirited after that happens to them. To overcome it betrays a genuine confidence that is quite, quite sickening. It also makes Ricky Ponting’s traditional pre-match words about South African mental scars seem a bit meaningless.

It’s being said everywhere, but if Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne had been playing, South Africa never would have made it. We’ll go one further and say that if they had been playing, South Africa wouldn’t have won, even if the wisened greats had bowled a load of toss. Sometimes you earn wickets through more than just your performance on the day and that’s a quality that’s extremely hard to replace.

AB de Villiers is in the process of building a reputation that he’s hard to bowl at. He also has another reputation, it seems. It might have been removed by now, but at the time of writing, his Wikipedia page featured the following sentence:

“De Villiers enjoys late nights while on tour with some of the local talent.”

There’s no preamble to that. It’s just one of a series of urelated ‘facts’ about his personal life, in between some quotes about Jesus and the name of his high school.

A B de Villiers reckons batting isn’t so hard on this pitch after all

Vehement letter C denier, A B de Villiers, is currently 217 not out, which knocks India’s 76 all out into a cocked hat.

A B de Villiers is young and richly talented. Let’s invite him round for tea but then pretend that we all thought he was a vegan. Then, when he asks why he’s eating different food from everyone else, we’ll say, “oh, sorry. We thought you were a vegan,” and instead of sharing the rest of the food, we’ll just let him carry on eating the vegan stuff.

Then afterwards, we’ll all play hide and seek in the garden, only everyone will hide inside when A B de Villiers is seeking and we’ll lock the door and he won’t be able to get in. Then we’ll pretend that we’ve lost the key and can’t open the door and then maybe it’ll start raining.

That’ll teach him.