Dewald Brevis: The AB de Villiers copycat, who has found his own wind

New Delhi: Growing up in Mohali, in a 2BHK flat, Shubman Gill’s favourite pastime was copying his childhood hero -- Virat Kohli. He would try to imitate his walk, his cover drive, his celebration, and even played most of his early career with a red handkerchief tucked in his trousers.Around 8,782 kilometers from Mohali, in Pretoria, in the Brevis’ backyard, Dewald and his elder brother Reinardt, wearing Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers’ Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) jerseys, used to mimic both the legends with match simulations -- imagining themselves pulling off a heist for RCB.

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Brevis has had a similar trajectory to Gill. Like Gill, he was portrayed as the next “prince.”Both of them hit a wall.

Form deserted them, critics came out with swords, but their heroes stood like rocks and kept backing them. Back in 2019, when Gill first entered the Indian dressing room in New Zealand, Kohli famously said: “I saw him bat in the nets and I was like 'wow -- I was not even 10 percent of that when I was 19.'”Similarly, De Villiers also helped Brevis in his early days. “I have been his mentor for about two years now and helped him with his batting and his attitude towards cricket,” De Villiers had told Netwerk24 in 2022, when the youngster burst onto the scene in the U19 World Cup.

In the last couple of months, Gill, the anointed prince, found his feet in Test cricket, smashing 754 runs in his first Test series as captain. It was Kohli again who wrote a special message for his successor at No. 4: “Well played star boy. Rewriting history. Onwards and upwards from here. You deserve all this,” Kohli wrote after Gill scored a sublime 269 and 161 at Edgbaston.Likewise, earlier this week, when Brevis smoked a 41-ball hundred against Australia, De Villiers went gung-ho over his countryman’s knock and took a shot at the IPL teams, saying: “The boy can play.”

What changed for Gill and Brevis?Before Shubman Gill was appointed Team India’s Test captain, he wanted to prove himself in England. He practiced with the red Dukes, worked on his trigger movement, and sought help from his cricket-tragic father Lakhwinder Singh Gill.Gill Sr. reminded the youngster why he was such a prolific run-scorer at the age-group level and in the Ranji Trophy, and asked him to “go back to the basics.” A confident Shubman even predicted that he wanted to be the best batter in the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy, and boy, did he walk the talk.

For Dewald Brevis, it was his childhood coach Deon Botes -- who has played a massive role in the development of several South African cricketers, including AB de Villiers and Faf du Plessis.Botes, an Economics professor and former Director of Sport at Afrikaans Hoër Seunskool, more popularly known as Affies, shared how the child prodigy battled his dark phase and turned it around.“He went back to his basics. So, I think with the T20 game, he might have gone a bit loose technically,” Botes told TimesofIndia.com.

“In T20 cricket, obviously power hitting plays a big role. And I think he got a bit stuck with that. Playing a bit more red-ball cricket in the domestic league, I think, helped him just to fine-tune his technique a bit. So, it just looks like the old Dewald Brevis that we knew. I think he’s basically gone back to what he knows works, and it’s been successful for him.”Brevis’ redemptionLast year, after Christmas, Brevis called Botes asking for help.“So, last year, on the 28th of December, he came back to me and we worked for three days on his game again. Just going back to the basics, to what he was used to,” shared Botes.“He just wanted to get back to basics, which we did. And we basically gave him a clearer mind of what he wanted to do. A lot of people talk to you and there’s a lot of noise about you, and at times, you kind of lose track of what you actually want to do and what works for you.

“So, he came back to me at the end of last year to just get back to his roots, back to the basics, and to find the right way for him to score. It was tough, but we had lots of conversations and lots of sessions to work through it.”When asked whether playing too much T20 cricket had corrupted Brevis’ technique, Botes said: “He really wanted to play cricket at the highest level and to show his skills and abilities. So, I think it was never about that for him.“He just wanted to play and score runs and be good. That’s basically all. Somewhere in this process, he might have got a bit confused about what he wanted to do. Like I said, there’s a lot of noise around playing like that, with people talking to him as a youngster. It’s probably difficult for him to work out who to listen to and who not. But he can’t listen to everybody. So when he came back to me, it was just about having one voice and going back to what works for him.

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Botes feels his ward is ready to take all three formats by storm.“I think he can definitely play in all three formats for South Africa. He’s already played in two of them. So it’s just the 50-over game he hasn’t debuted in yet, but I think that will come now.“Yes, I think he’ll be successful in all three. I think Dewald would actually appreciate the long format, red-ball cricket. And I think he’s good enough to make it in all three formats,” he said.Make way for the Next GenEvery cricket lover has lived that moment, standing before a mirror, trying to mimic a hero’s batting stance or a bowler’s graceful run-up and release. Most imitations end in awkward copies, but a rare few manage to carry those borrowed styles all the way to the international stage. It’s the perfect embodiment of the saying: fake it till you make it.

Experts often insist that a player’s trademark shot or bowling action is inimitable, something born of instinct and impossible to reproduce.

Yet, some youngsters tune that noise out and keep practicing what inspires them.Take Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers, for instance. They have long been the blueprint for aspiring cricketers. And Shubman Gill and Dewald Brevis, their biggest admirers, seem to have unlocked that template. From cover drives to the lap shot, from the scoop to the front-foot punch, to the reverse sweep -- Gill and Brevis mirror the range of their idols with astonishing ease.