Do you know the only way you can successfully ‘dig in’ as a batsman? Completely and utterly mindlessly. Any other approach is far too much mental hard work and means you’ll make a bad decision sooner rather than later.

We wrote a long thing for the Nightwatchman, Wisden’s quarterly publication, about the psychology of digging in recently. It’s not out yet, but you can order it here.

Not many people wanted to speak to us about the subject, which was weird. Maybe it’s too abstract a subject for the experts to really hold forth on.

Fortunately, one person was willing to speak to us and that person was AB de Villiers.

Mr Rearguard

Now you might think that AB de Villiers is a terrible person to speak to about digging in because he’s Mr All-Of-The-Shots, isn’t he? He’s the guy who once made 149 runs off 44 balls against the West Indies in under an hour.

But AB de Villiers is actually the perfect person to speak to because he is the most aggressive batsman to have also played a pure out-and-out rearguard.

In November 2012, de Villiers made 33 off 220 balls so that South Africa could save a Test against Australia. In 2015 he made 43 off 297 balls in almost six hours of batting, attempting something similar against India. (South Africa lost that one.)

It’s one thing to be Shivnarine Chanderpaul and bat all day because that’s what Shivnarine Chanderpaul does. If you’re AB de Villiers and you take the decision to go shotless, that’s something very different.

An AB de Villiers rearguard probably tells us more about how a normal batsman might go about digging in, because adopting the Shiv approach would demand going back in time to spend six hours a day on the bowling machine and that’s not really an option.

So what did AB say?

After a bit of guff about ‘motivation’ and ‘passion’ he said that those two rearguards were really just “an extreme version of my basics”.

He was talking technically primarily, but the point is that he saw those innings as being at one end of a continuum and not something ‘other’ – which is how batsmen often seem to approach the task of stonewalling.

AB does in fact practise this sort of thing. Every day.

“I just play 10 to 20 balls where I just do that: I literally let the ball almost hit me before I just block it dead. I feel it’s the best possible position I can get in as a batsman.”

You might be thinking that that was the kind of thing he did in the nets before a Test match and that he doesn’t bother any more. But no.

“I do these drills every single format, every single game I play in. It’s not about what shot I’m playing; it’s literally just seeing the ball and letting it come to me, almost allowing it to hit my stumps before I play it. Once I’ve done ten of those, I’m ready to play in any format, anywhere in the world.”

There are a lot of different clichés about just playing the ball and not overthinking things. ‘Watch the ball’ is the oldest. ‘Play each ball on its merits’ is another. ‘See ball, hit ball’ is a newer toddlerspeak one, but it’s based on the same principle.

All of these things say that conscious thought is your enemy.

The Nightwatchman piece has a lot more about the psychological explanation for this, but we’ll not get into that here. All we really need to know is that when it comes to reacting, conscious thought is only going to trip you up. Whatever your ability, whatever the sport, most people will recognise that they play best on autopilot.

We put this to de Villiers, who said: “Spot on. When I see the ball, I let it come to me and I just play it – that’s when I’m at my best. So I always try and remind myself [of that] with every innings, with every practice session, with every warm-up I have.”

For him, all good batting is based on that principle. “When I play T20s, I do a similar sort of thing. It’s just a lot more attacking,” he said.

In short, any batsman who thinks to himself, ‘Right. I’m going to make a really conscious effort to dig in,” is not likely to play a long innings. The extra thoughts tend to get in the way of what comes naturally and they’ll also rapidly drain their mental reserves. (Quick example to explain that last point: your first day in a new job is always exhausting because of how much conscious thought it demands.)

So how the hell can a batsman dig in?

It’s difficult – and that’s the thing people almost never properly acknowledge.

It’s not a matter of passion or pride or any of that bollocks. It’s a psychological skill; an ability to play in a manner appropriate to the situation in the most mentally efficient manner possible.

There are lots of ingredients: You have to believe you can do it, you have to believe it’s the best approach and you also have to be able to play that way without imposing too great a mental load on yourself.

That’s a really tricky thing to do and it means that digging in is best delivered by two types of batsmen: the ones who pretty much play that way anyway and the ones who’ve already experienced a wide range of situations and have learned to adapt their game almost effortlessly.

The one thing we really want to emphasise to the ‘dig in’ brigade; the ‘show some commitment’ crew (a group of people who seem to use words like ‘pathetic’ and ‘disgrace’ a hell of a lot more than the average person), is that this is not something you can switch on at will. It’s almost the opposite really.

Trying to dig in is like trying to see one of those Magic Eye pictures from back in the day. The more you force it, the further away you get.

First published in August 2019.

4 minute readMany things happened during Australia’s win in the first Test of their ill-fated 2018 tour of South Africa. Some of them were cricket, some of them were David Warner falling out with people. The thing that interests us the most – AB de Villiers’ second innings run-out – fell somewhere in between.

Let’s break the moment down, because it was really quite something. We’re struggling to think of a more disrespectful dismissal.

The context

The South Africans were near enough 200 runs behind on first innings and had then found themselves chasing 417 to win.

They quickly fell to 39-3 and so had basically lost. You wouldn’t think there was much left to get het-up about at this point, but then you’re not David Warner.

David Warner is, you suspect, the kind of man who snaps the remote in half in fury when the batteries start to get a bit low.

The run-out

Nathan Lyon dobbed one down the leg-side and South Africa opener Aiden Markram nurdled the ball towards David Warner.

As Warner scuttled round to get it, AB de Villiers set off down the pitch before doing a big U-turn when he looked up and saw only Markram’s back.

Sadly for de Villiers, he’d gone sufficiently far that the run-out was never in doubt. Warner was grinning even as he threw the ball.

At the bowler’s end, Lyon enveloped the ball with his Mekon hands and duly broke the stumps.

Nathan Lyon’s bit

What we didn’t mention was that AB de Villiers was on nought, having only faced one ball. Now here he was lying on his face, run-out in a match his team were about to lose.

Being run-out is always rubbish because to some extent it’s always self-inflicted. It’s worse still when you end up literally lying on your face in the dirt at the moment it happens.

Here’s AB de Villiers literally lying on his face in the dirt having been run out for a duck in a match his team is about to lose.

What happened next was that Nathan Lyon saw AB de Villiers literally lying on his face in the dirt having been run out for a duck in a match his team is about to lose and thought to himself: “This isn’t quite humiliating enough. I think I need to ramp this up a bit. I need to really emphasise the fact that AB de Villiers is literally lying on his face in the dirt having been run out for a duck in a match his team is about to lose.”

So Lyon ran past, looking down at him, and to emphasise that de Villiers was both literally and metaphorically fallen, he dropped the ball near him.

You’ll note that we italicised ‘nearly’ in that last sentence. As you can see, Lyon is looking directly at de Villiers even having passed him and is dropping/flinging the ball as he does so. You could maybe, if you so chose, argue that he dropped the ball at de Villiers.

David Warner’s bit

Lyon could not have executed his run-out and ball-drop without the assistance of David Warner. Warner too was hugely keen to emphasise the fact that his team was winning the Test match.

Presumably feeling that the surviving batsman had escaped lightly, he chose to convey his team’s supremacy to Aiden Markram.

Australia wicketkeeper Tim Paine said at stumps that there “wasn’t too much aggression” during Warner’s send-off (which technically wasn’t actually a send-off because Markram wasn’t going anywhere).

Here is Warner’s Hatred Face midway through said send-off. We’re pretty sure we have never been this angry with anyone about anything in our entire life.

Now we want you to understand something at this point because it doesn’t really come across in stills. Warner is aiming this face AT Aiden Markram. Aiden Markram is the subject of the hatred.

All of Warner’s team-mates came and mobbed him for doing the run-out throw and yet he physically struggled with them to ensure he retained a direct line of sight to Markram.

A direct line of sight to Markram was important to Warner because he didn’t want there to be any miscommunciation about just how much he hated him

It doesn’t really need stating explicitly, but obviously as well as making the face, Warner was  saying things at Markram.

And yes, ‘at’ is the right word here. David Warner was most definitely not saying things to Aiden Markram; he was saying them at him.

First published in March 2018.

An eye-rolling return for our much-shrugged-at feature ‘mop-up of the day’ in which we very briefly make reference to something you probably expected us to write significantly more about before tacking on a couple of unrelated links at the end of the article.

Today’s Big News is that AB de Villiers is apparently “in talks” about returning to the South Africa team for the T20 World Cup. Cricinfo reports that, “conversations on the subject have been ongoing for several months,” which is how these things always seem to go with him.

De Villiers is pretty much constantly on the verge of a return for some World Cup or other but it never seems to actually happen. He’s like comeback king Shahid Afridi only with no follow-through.

Before he was involved in an eternal discussion about his return, de Villiers was involved in a protracted debate about not playing. Who’s involved in this conversation? Presumably there’s a WhatsApp group called ‘Does AB want to play or does he need more of a rest?’ and every few weeks someone remembers it and it kicks into life again.

In other news…

We’ve added a link to the answers for last week’s crossword. They’re in .xls format.

Our twice-a-month email The Edge should be going out tomorrow. The last one was sufficiently filthy that it got flagged as spam by many people’s email providers. We can think of no greater recommendation, so please sign up for that.

At this point, it feels very much like we should ‘throw forward’ to what else will be happening on King Cricket over the next week or so, but the truth is we’ve no idea.

That image above is AB de Villiers punching a drive exactly where he wants it to go while batting with a stump. You don’t need to have tried to bat with a stump to know that this is a difficult thing to do. Bats are narrow. Stumps are narrower.

It is not the most ridiculous shot AB de Villiers has ever played. Not even close. It is just an indication of what all the ridiculous shots are built on.

One time, against the West Indies, AB de Villiers made 149 off 44 balls. Another time, against Australia, he batted for a draw and made 33 off 220 balls.

As a cricketer, AB de Villiers likes to explore the realms of possibility.

Yesterday Cricinfo reported that de Villiers had asked to come out of international retirement the day before South Africa named their World Cup squad.

De Villiers has a complex relationship with international retirement. It is quite hard to follow the timeline of when he has and hasn’t been available in the various formats in recent years. He first went part-time in January 2016, while he was technically captain. “I’m just going to waltz back into the side whenever I feel like it from now on,” he may or may not have said at that time.

After endless ins and outs and maybes and maybe nots, de Villiers eventually made a statement in October of last year. “It will be very selfish and arrogant of me to throw statements around that I’m keen to play a World Cup,” he said.

It seemed clear enough. But then do you see the mistake you made? You concluded that it would be impossible for someone who said those words to do the very thing that they themselves had observed would make them “very selfish and arrogant.”

AB de Villiers doesn’t believe in impossibilities.

< 1 minute read

AB de Villiers spent rather a long time desperately trying to engineer a cake monopoly. He wanted to retain and eat The Cake of International Cricket; he wanted to retain and eat The Lucrative Cake of T20 Franchise Cricket; and he also wanted to retain and eat The Cake of Having a Little Bit of Time Off.

Sometimes a man’s desires are impractical and AB finally seems to have accepted that the world isn’t organised how he wants it to be. He’s therefore taken the decision to forego The Cake of International Cricket.

It seems odd timing with a World Cup not so far away. Maybe David Warner and Nathan Lyon broke his spirit.

2 minute readAB de Villiers is very good. We’re pretty sure most of you will agree with that insightful assessment. But where do we  see him at his best?

We can think of five immediately obvious environments in which AB de Villiers might be seen.

• In a music video
• Just sort of milling around in public, at an airport say
• In T20 cricket
• In one-day cricket
• In Test cricket

Let’s quickly run through each of these to try and work out where AB de Villiers is at his best.

Because if you want to see a thing renowned for its very-goodness, ideally you want to stand a reasonable chance of having the very qualities that define that very-goodness displayed to you, otherwise what’s the point?

In a music video

In a music video is a place in which AB de Villiers appears to be a below-average person. In a music video does not show AB de Villiers at his best. (More on this subject here.)

Just sort of milling around in public, at an airport say

AB de Villiers may well attract a certain amount of attention when he’s just sort of milling around in public, at an airport say, but we’d argue that this is merely residual attention resulting from his feats in other environments. AB de Villiers is no better at just sort of milling around in public, at an airport say, than anyone else. In fact he’s arguably worse, because he no doubt has a tendency to flee back indoors what with all the attention and whatnot.

In T20 cricket

AB de Villiers will often make slightly more runs than other people playing in the same T20 cricket  match and he will generally make those runs slightly more quickly. AB de Villiers looks very good in T20 cricket.

In one-day cricket

We would argue that AB de Villiers looks slightly better in one-day cricket than he does in T20 cricket. Given more time to make runs, the difference between himself and other batsmen playing in the same match will generally become more apparent.

In Test cricket

In Test cricket, with no real time constraints, batsmen can go about making their runs however they damn well choose. They needn’t feel rushed into playing shots they don’t necessarily feel comfortable with. They can play how they want.

Despite this, there are times when even mere survival is beyond most batsmen when AB de Villiers not only survives, but also scores runs, and not only scores runs, but does so at a rate utterly beyond most people even on a day when survival is not a seemingly unattainable goal.

We would therefore argue that ‘in Test cricket’ is the environment where AB de Villiers is at his best.

2 minute read

A real man of the match performance from AB de Villiers won England the first T20 international against South Africa. The greatest sportsman who ever lived ate up 58 balls in making an unbeaten 65.

If the innings hinted at a two-paced pitch, England’s batsmen only noticed one of them and weren’t unduly troubled by the other.

For all the adulation, it’s worth remembering that de Villiers isn’t actually all that good at T20, one of the two formats he still deigns to play. Nor has he done a right lot else in recent times.

De Villiers’ last Test hundred (do we mean ‘most recent’ or ‘final’) came in January 2015. His most recent one-day international hundred came in January 2016.

This isn’t to talk him down. He’s been an extraordinary batsman, but we’re starting to wonder whether he ever will be again. He’s supposedly fully focused on the 2019 World Cup, but in the Champions Trophy he looked like a man short of cricket. You wonder whether he might want to broaden out his tunnel vision a tad.

In this match he looked like a man playing with a hollow bat.

Jason Roy isn’t in great form either. His body is – as one stout over of straight-batted thonking proved – but his brain is not.

Refusing to stick to the methodology that had started to reap rich dividends, Roy for some reason backed himself to play someone else’s natural game and unfurled a suicidal reverse sweep.

Clearly Roy feels he has something to prove. That proof will probably only come once he feels differently.

< 1 minute read

Very slowly. He’s not yet at a point where he’ll accept that his final Test was in January last year.

Earlier this week, de Villiers made himself unavailable for selection for the upcoming Test series in New Zealand in March. Today he ruled himself out of the Test series against England in July-August.

Future withdrawals and unavailability for five-day cricket will be announced as and when series are scheduled.

< 1 minute read

AB de Villiers has stood down as South Africa Test captain. Faf du Plessis has filled the void, much as he has been doing for quite a while now.

This decision makes sense to us for two reasons. Firstly, de Villiers hardly ever plays cricket for South Africa at the minute, while du Plessis does. Secondly, de Villiers is a bad captain, whereas du Plessis seems quite a good one.

They’ve emphasised the first reason in the announcement.

De Villiers always seemed to look upon captaincy much as a schoolboy does, for some reason equating hand-eye co-ordination with aptitude for strategic thinking and man management.

Whether he has actually been disabused of the notion that he should captain his country because he is the best batsman is unclear. Like many skilful cricketers, we suspect he’ll always believe that his physical ability will directly translate into more cerebral activities connected with the sport. A career as a commentator surely awaits.