/ 6 November 2014

‘Windgat mannetjie’ lets off steam

A Titan with the bat: The runs are flowing for Theunis de Bruyn this summer.
A Titan with the bat: The runs are flowing for Theunis de Bruyn this summer.

Shortly after being installed as the Titans’ chief executive, Jacques Faul received a delegation made up of young Theunis de Bruyn and his father, Theunis senior. More often than not, such encounters tend to be booby traps. Fathers of young sportsmen can be flaky, or pushy, or both, and Faul would have been within his rights to have tip-toed into the meeting as well as out of it.

It says much for the respective parties that the conversation ended amicably. In response to Theunis’s question about what his future held, Faul was polite but forthright. His reply was that De Bruyn junior was clearly a talent but there was a pecking order. He would need to wait in line.

Recalling last year’s encounter, the adjective Faul uses to describe the young man is “assertive”.

De Bruyn has certainly asserted himself with the bat this summer. He has already scored two Momentum One-Day Cup hundreds (including a pugnacious 152 against the Warriors in Port Elizabeth) and narrowly missed out on a debut Sunfoil Series hundred in the four-day competition when he fell five short against the Warriors at Willowmoore Park.

It hasn’t been the runs themselves as much as the manner of their making that has set knowledgeable tongues wagging. De Bruyn responds to a cricket ball in roughly the same way a trout lunges at a fly – an instinct player who will grab at pretty much anything that floats into range.

It’s slightly surprising, therefore, to hear that the former South African under-19 player rates long-form cricket as the place where he would ultimately like to succeed. Perhaps there is more to De Bruyn’s game and personality than immediately meets the eye.

Self-assertion hasn’t been confined to the pitch. De Bruyn has a keen nose for those who are carrying agendas rather than kit in their coffins and, although he doesn’t go into details, he says in an interview that he has already told some of his colleagues that their attitude isn’t what it should be. This presumably means that he hasn’t always been the Titan’s most popular player, particularly as the lip comes from someone so young.

Diplomatic skills
One is reminded of a mouthy Graeme Smith at a similar age, someone whose capacity for truth-telling was formidable but whose diplomatic skills weren’t as well-developed.

“I knew that Tukkies were looking for a first-team captain so I phoned up Pierre de Bruyn [the Tukkies coach] to put forward my name,” says De Bruyn of a watershed moment in his fledgling career.

“He said he would think about it. A day later he phoned and said that, yes, he was happy.

“I love the challenge of captaincy. My ultimate challenge is to see how many lives I can change.”

De Bruyn captained Tukkies to winning the inaugural Red Bull T20 Challenge earlier this year, a competition that features universities and technical colleges from around the world. The semifinals and final were played at the Oval in London and the win for the most successful club cricket side in South Africa over the past three seasons initiated a period of such frenzy that De Bruyn set aside his BCom accounting studies to concentrate on cricket full time.

A buccaneering October has made things even more worthwhile, as the comparisons started flowing more freely than the Vaal Dam sluices after a week of heavy rain.

“It’s exciting but sometimes you don’t know how to behave,” he admits. “I remember when AB [de Villiers] and Morné [Morkel] came into the Titans dressing room and I met them for the first time. I wasn’t quite sure how to speak to them, so I got up to introduce myself and say hello, and AB just said he already knows who I am.”

Unusually gifted
For better or worse, the corridors of Centurion are already heavy with talk that De Bruyn is similar to De Villiers at the same age. Those making the comparisons see the limitations of what they are doing but they don’t seem to be able to help themselves. Part of it all is simple expectation, the kind of tingling sensation that comes from having an unusually gifted and headstrong young cricketer in your midst.

Here, after all, stands someone who says he refused the South Africa under-19 captaincy because he preferred not to work with the then under-19 coach, Ray Jennings. This is a kid who knows his own mind and who will probably alienate one or two team-mates along the way.

Talking about himself while still at school, De Bruyn says he was a windgat mannetjie (presumptuous youngster), liable to “get ahead of myself” and, although there are suggestions that he might not have left this entirely behind, he is more composed now, and more comfortable. What comes across while listening to him is a capacity for self-sufficiency twinned with his penchant for self-assertion.

In talking about autobiographies, ghosted or otherwise, he makes the point that he wouldn’t be comfortable in getting someone else to write his story for him. It’s a comment that makes sense, for De Bruyn is already writing the early chapters of what is likely to be a long and unusual book.