ICC ODI Cricketer of the Year 2016: Quinton De Kock's 5 best ODI innings of the year
He may look baby-faced and gentle at one glance, but his cricket could not have been more different. With a bat in hand, currently there are few as destructive as Quinton de Kock has been in recent years. Though he has been making waves in international cricket for quite a while now, it is the year 2016 that could be the watershed point in his young career.
The hard-hitting wicket-keeper batsman was a prolific run scorer across all formats in this season. Though a consistent performer in limited overs cricket, he had not made a mark in the longer version of the game earlier. But he returned to the Test side this year and never looked back since.
Sticking to his natural flair for strokeplay in Tests too, he scored 589 runs in 11 innings at 65.44. This included counter-attacking centuries against the visiting England team at the Centurion and a similar innings in response to a batting collapse at Hobart, during South Africa’s tour of Australia last month. Besides, he also scored four consecutive fifties in the format.
Comparisons have already been drawn with a certain Adam Gilchrist – quite an honour of the highest order for any wicket-keeper batsman. Incidentally, both are attacking left-handed wicket-keeper batsmen who open(ed) the batting in limited overs cricket.
Though he chose to brush off such comparisons, today De Kock is the proud recipient of the ‘ICC ODI Cricketer of the Year’. The ICC Awards announced a few days back, took into account player performances between 14 September 2015 and 20 September 2016. In the intervening period, De Kock had scored 793 runs from 16 innings at an average of 56.64, including four centuries and a fifty.
Here we look back at five of his top knocks in the 2015-16 season:
#5 103 vs India, Rajkot
De Kock has always fancied the Indian bowling, against whom he once cracked a record three consecutive hundreds in a series. The trend continued when South Africa toured India last year. In the five-match ODI series that South Africa won 3-2, he scored two more centuries.
In the third ODI at Rajkot, De Kock’s 103 stood out as it helped South Africa take lead in the series. It was his fourth century in seven innings against India. An innings that saw him battle cramps and tight spells of spin bowling, De Kock played in an uncharacteristic fashion, trading flamboyance for patience.
His 118-run partnership with Faf du Plessis was crucial in a match that the Proteas won by a margin of 18 runs.