“DE KOCK Please don’t retire after this World Cup.”
A spectator in the MCA Pavilion at the Wankhede Stadium here held a hand-written poster during Tuesday’s World Cup tie between South Africa and Bangladesh.
Considering the dream run that Quinton de Kock has had in this edition so far, calls for him to reverse his decision to retire from ODIs after the World Cup could get louder after Sunday’s Rugby World Cup final.
Now that de Kock has topped the run-scoring charts, thanks to his three hundreds in five innings including Tuesday’s record-breaking 174, the retirement talk has perhaps taken a back-seat, at least for the South Africa change-room.
“It’s easy to score a hundred and then sort of take a back seat, but every single day that he comes to training and the games that he has played so far, you know, scoring three hundreds in five innings is a pretty special effort,” Jean-Paul Duminy, South Africa’s batting coach, said on Tuesday.
“Knowing the character that he is, he is certainly not going to rest on that. He has got great ambitions to go all the way and be a real strong performer for the team.”
Aiden Markram, the South Africa stand-in captain during its back-to-back wins in Mumbai, stressed that de Kock is valued by the group much more than his exploits on the field.
“We all know Quinton to be the free-spirited guy that he is, but he actually has a fantastic cricket brain on him. He assesses the conditions really well and communicates that to us off the field even before we walk out to bat,” Markram said. “It adds a lot of value in that regard. And then you never want to clip his wings really. You just want to let him fly. He structures it the exact way he feels need, and we back that completely as a unit.”
Record run
de Kock’s 174 against Bangladesh is the highest score by a wicketkeeper in a World Cup match, surpassing Adam Gilchrist’s 149 during Australia’s 2007 final win over Sri Lanka
de Kock’s 174 is the second-highest individual score by a South African in Men’s World Cup, after Gary Kirsten’s 188 not out against UAE in 1996
On Tuesday, de Kock became only the sixth batter to have scored three hundred in a single Men’s World Cup edition.
He is the leading run-getter in this edition with 407 runs from five games.
