Tony de Zorzi returned to the Wanderers eight years after he was captain of King Edwards VII, one of Johannesburg’s best schools, and seven years after he led South Africa’s Under-19 team to a World Cup where they were the defending champions but finished in 11th place. He found friends he didn’t know he had.

There were a few of my friends here, and it’s always nice to have my mum watching,” de Zorzi said. “Some people said they were my friends, but I’ve never met them.”

Natasha raised de Zorzi on her own, and he has always wanted to be the best he could be for her. She doesn’t watch him play much anymore because he took the long way to become an international cricket player. He went to the same school as Neil McKenzie and Graeme Smith, then to Pretoria, and finally to Cape Town, which is 1400 kilometres away from where he grew up. In a way, it was good for de Zorzi to play his first Test match on the Highveld and get his first fifty while Natasha was watching.

He said, “She always sits in the same spot, so I knew where she was.” “Since I’m in Cape Town, she hasn’t been able to watch many games. I hope I can get three figures the next time she comes.”

De Zorzi has set high goals for himself. In the last two years, only one of his teammates has scored a hundred at home, and only two others (Sarel Erwee and Kyle Verreynne, neither of whom is playing in this series) have reached 100. But because he has let people down in the past, he knows this is his chance to step up.

“My life has changed a lot since I played for SA under-19,” de Zorzi said. “I was captain, but I wasn’t the star of that side,” he said.

Because Wiaan Mulder did it. When De Zorzi came back from the World Cup for his age group, he had to go back to club cricket and “start over.” He played for the University of Pretoria team, which was led by Kruger van Wyk, who is now the fielding coach. Then he got a job with Northerns, where he kept getting better and better and averaged almost 80 for the second-tier provincial team in the summer of 2016–17. In the summer of 2020, he moved to Western Province, where Ashwell Prince was the head coach. Since then, he has been made captain.

This summer, he is averaging over 100, mostly because of his unbeaten 304 against the Knights, when Gerald Coetzee was part of his attack (though admittedly not many other big names).

“It’s been a long process, and I’m glad it’s come to this,” said de Zorzi. “It also reminds me of where I came from and to not get too far ahead of myself because I had to do a lot of dirty work to get there. Some guys start getting it a little bit earlier. Mine is starting to come true right now.”

After averaging over 48 in three of the last four seasons, de Zorzi was hard to ignore in this Test squad, but it took a change in leadership for that to happen. He got his chance because the new red-ball coach, Shukri Conrad, also acts as a selector when there isn’t a panel. “We knew it would be a new start when the coaches changed,” de Zorzi said. “If everyone took a chance and did well, you knew there would be a new set of eyes and maybe even more chances. That was a lot of fun. Dean Elgar, who was captain at the time, used to say that the number of runs you scored would get you into the team. Guys knew that they had to have a good season if they wanted to move up. There was nothing else to do.”

But now that it has, players like de Zorzi need to take control of their space. He showed West Indies’ attack what he was made of in the first Test, and Kyle Mayers saw it. “This guy seems to have everything together,” he said. “He is square of the wicket and strong.”

De Zorzi is very good at the cut shot. In this innings, he got almost a third of his runs with the cut shot. However, the West Indies had already figured him out from the first Test. At the SuperSport Park, they tried to give him less space. De Zorzi said, “They stick to the basics a little bit longer.” “You might get a few less bad balls, but international cricketers who do their homework are going to do it. I could tell they had different plans based on how they bowled to me today compared to how they did it at SuperSport Park. They can make it harder for you to score. And, of course, the intensity is a little bit higher. When I got out, I was really tired. It is not easy.”

But so was de Zorzi. During the free-flowing afternoon session in South Africa, he played well. Natasha sat still in the Memorial Stand the whole time. De Zorzi made his first sign to her when he hit Alzarri Joseph out of the ground with the 82nd ball he faced. She would have been incredibly proud, no doubt. As the pitch got faster and West Indies made a comeback, De Zorzi faced 73 more balls and scored 35 more runs.

They lost five wickets for 64 runs after tea, so the game is now tied. If South Africa can’t score more than 350, West Indies might be able to fight back. If you give up on that, on a pitch that is already starting to turn, the game might be over. Either way, it’s set up to bring in people who didn’t know they liked cricket, especially during a mid-week Test match when only a small part of the stadium is filled. But it’s important. And de Zorzi knows that better than anyone else.

Sometimes almost everything that makes up a Test match is found in a single ball. One of those balls was the one that knocked Pat Cummins out of the game on the third morning in Delhi. It had the blunt precision of the Indian spinners, the deadly glide that made this pitch so hard to play on, and the sweep, a high-risk, high-reward shot so controversial that a thousand autopsies were written about it.

And there was one more thing. After the ball slipped under Cummins‘ bat, it hit the inside edge of the outside stump, bounced off the side of the middle stump and landed in KS Bharat’s gloves.

The ball didn’t spin sharply, but it didn’t go all the way with the arm either. After it was thrown, it straightened just a little. It also stayed low before bouncing off the stumps twice. Bharat had followed the ball all the way, even as Cummins took a wild swing, and he had collected it cleanly.

It didn’t matter because the ball was dead by the time he reached it, but he did a good job with his glove.

Later that day, when India had lost four wickets and were 27 runs away from their target, Bharat was moved up the order and scored a brilliant unbeaten 23 off 22 balls, including three perfectly timed fours to cover and a solid knock with a slog-swept six.

In his first two Test innings, Bharat had scored 8 and 6 in the first two games of this series. He must have felt much better after that start because he played on Sunday. Some watching from the outside might have even thought he was trying to save his career with that performance.

But India probably wouldn’t have seriously considered taking Bharat out of the game after Delhi, even if he had done nothing in the second innings. They probably know that anyone can score a number of low scores on difficult pitches, and they may have seen glimpses of Bharat’s counter-attacking potential during his brief stint with the Indian national team

It took a long time for these things to happen.

In May 2018, Indian senior team officials selected Bharat as the goalkeeper for the four-day tour and Rishabh Pant as the goalkeeper for the 50-over tour. The Indian senior team was also touring England that summer, so the A tour was a shadow tour. At the time, officials felt that Bharat was India’s best pure goalkeeper and Pant was an exciting batsman whose glovework needed work.

When Wriddhiman Saha got injured and could not join the England tour, India included Pant in its Test team in place of Bharat. The genius is going in his own direction.

But Bharat remained an important player in India’s second team. Since the beginning of 2018, he has played 19 first-class matches for the India A team, which is more than any other player except Abhimanyu Easwaran, who bats first. In those India A matches, he has scored 971 runs at a rate of 48.55, including three hundreds.

Last year, when India took Saha out of its test team, Bharat took his place. So it made sense that Bharat made his debut when Pant was injured. The Indian team management may have been tempted by Ishan Kishan’s competing claims, but they chose Bharat at the start of this Border-Gavaskar series.

At the start of the 2019-20 home season, India dropped Pant from the Test programme XI and brought back Saha for a series against South Africa. Virat Kohli described Saha as the best goalkeeper in the world and they felt his good glove work was important on India’s winding tracks. They felt that Pant still needed to work on his goalkeeping. Pant worked on it and became a world-class goalkeeper when India played England in early 2021. Until then, however, Saha was still the first choice for home games.

At the start of this series between India and Australia, the same idea was in play. India appreciates how good Bharat is with the bat, but they know he is their best goalkeeper when Pant is not around.

Ben Stokes had only recently broken the record for Test sixes when he told previous holder Brendon McCullum that Harry Brook would soon break it. Joe Root’s admiration for Brook’s “extraordinary” way of “almost forcing Test attacks” smacked of jealousy. At Mount Maunganui, two modern Test greats were swarming within 24 hours of a young man who was to make their mark.

Mark Wood said earlier this winter, during the Pakistan T20I series in September and October, that he saw a bit of AB de Villiers at Brook. Back in the summer of 2022, when Stokes actively decided against selecting Harry Brook, he somehow managed to make him big. He did so well that he almost broke the captain’s promise to trust a lineup that had won five of the last six Tests.

English cricket has never been kind to the public. And we are not talking about the kind of praise Stokes and Root received early in their careers, when they were still finding their feet among illustrious teammates. This was real, high-profile NBA hype, the kind you get when a rookie becomes the linchpin of a franchise in his first year. Other countries would trade their mothers to get it.

The sigh of “that boy, man” that rings out with every shot Harry Brook takes. The quiet disbelief you feel when you see someone who looks so commanding so early in his journey. The reactions he evokes in the stands and on the turf: he holds their attention, he gets them roaring while remaining calm, like a DJ, who becomes a firecracker, and then the palpable disappointment when he finally leaves. Even the similarities to Kevin Pietersen are so striking that you have to wonder what the man himself thinks. Pietersen was a singular genius. And yet this boy struts around, picking lengths and hitting b

Only this hype has changed in recent months. It’s no longer just a squishy concept, and it now feels like we’re doing some kind of due diligence by promising so much in its name. Brook is already exceeding expectations.

“I think he’s going to be a global superstar,” Stokes said after England’s win at Mount Maunganui, where Brook boosted England’s batting pace with 89 and 54 and was named player of the match for the third straight year. The England captain is usually the one asking the media to ease up on the pressure. At this moment, he seems to think it’s all just fact.

“You can tell if a player has what it takes, but you never know if they’re going to be successful,” Root said. “If you throw them into the unknown, can they handle the pressure and everything else? It was a pleasure to watch him come in here and play the way he did

Brook has now scored six runs of fifty or more in his first eight innings, for a total of 623 runs at an average of 87.71. Only five players have scored more runs on as many hits, which is remarkable in itself, especially considering that Brook’s game ultimately comes with a trade-off: he can leave runs out in the middle by taking more risks for the good of the team.

The fact that he has scored three hundreds in six innings, while only one man (Mohammad Azharuddin) has done so in fewer innings, shows that he strikes an incredible balance. However, it’s worth noting that this is a unique balance.

Looking at the statistics after just five Tests, he has taken 643 knocks for his 623 runs, which equates to a batting rate of 96.9 and puts him in the far corner of the chart as an outlier. Only Adam Gilchrist (440 at 81.8) and David Warner (383 at 85.5) have a similar record.

Incidentally, none of this is a fluke, even if you discount the weaker passing attacks. Brook has regularly participated in a regimen of volunteer training sessions. With not much to do in Pakistan, he was frequently at the gym, working diligently on a strength program to help him increase his weight.

This winter, his quest for self-improvement manifested itself in other ways. During the T20 World Cup, he greeted his batting coach, Mike Hussey, at the start of each training session and asked him what he should work on. Brook felt that the legendary Australian knew much more about his craft than he did. “What else can I add to my game?” was the overarching theme of their meetings.

He consulted with Martin Speight, his old cricket coach at Sedbergh who is now his mentor, after playing spinner Abrar Ahmed badly off the pitch in the first innings at Multan. Harry Brook scored 108 runs in the second innings after quickly figuring out what had gone wrong.

Amazingly, even in the middle of the field, he seems to be constantly evaluating, analysing and improving his game. Often to the amusement of his partner on the other end of the line.

“You should hear the conversations he has out there,” Root said. “He’s spraying himself … not to calm himself down, but to get it out of his system before he plays the next ball

Root sees this as a positive sign. A sign of “inner confidence” rather than an overburdened soul flagellating himself. “That’s a big reason why he’s going to be successful for a long time.”

When a player makes a spectacular appearance, people often expect him to stumble. For example, when the Australian fast attack comes at him with short balls. Harry Brook could improve in this area, but only relative to the quality of the rest of his game. Nobody is perfect, and only about three people in the world can play the short ball well.

There will be a regression to a Brook-specific standard that is still greater than most. But with each step forward, that regression seems further and further away. Aside from the mental and technical distractions that come with increasing numbers of short passing players, Harry Brook has a focus and approach that suggests he’ll be far more durable than most.

Maybe that sounds a little too optimistic. In any case, it’s hard to deny that the sport of cricket, and not just English cricket, has plenty of talent to enjoy for a long time to come.