File photo of AB de Villiers
One of the greatest cricketers of his time, AB de Villiers is a name that terrorized opponent teams’ bowlers, no matter the format. Even after his international retirement, De Villiers played some extravagant knocks in the Indian Premier League (IPL) for Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB). However, the former South Africa star retired from professional cricket without winning a single IPL title. In today’s times, De Villiers’ style of play is often compared with India’s T20I captain Suryakumar Yadav. During one such discussion, former India batter Sanjay Manjrekar made a bold comment on De Villiers’ career.
Manjrekar, who is known to be quite blunt with his opinions and criticism, said that Suryakumar has already eclipsed De Villiers when it comes to the comparison of their match-winning impacts in the shortest format. Manjrekar, making a rather bold assessment, stressed that De Villiers played for the wrong IPL franchise.
“I’ll say yes, because of the match-winning impact. AB was incredible. But AB’s greatness was that he averaged 50 in Tests. Even in one day (ODIs). So, he’s an amazing player. But only if you look at T20 cricket; I’ve seen both of them a lot. AB, in IPL, he was not used properly. His real ability. So, in IPL we didn’t get that much juice out of him. Definitely (batted higher). And, sorry to say, but played for the wrong franchise. If he had played elsewhere, we could have seen the greatness of AB de Villiers,” he said on Star Sports.
Over the course of his IPL career, in which De Villiers played for two franchises — Delhi Daredevils and Royal Challengers Bengaluru – he scored a total of 5162 runs, of which 4491 came for RCB. he also scored two centuries and 37 fifties for the Bengaluru side.
De Villiers is also one of the only seven players to score more than 5000 runs in the T20 league.
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