AB de Villiers is considered to be a generational talent given how easy he made playing cricket look like. He had an exceptional career for South Africa, playing 114 Tests, 228 ODIs, and 78 T20Is from 2004-2018.
He also captained South Africa, especially in the 2015 World Cup, where the Proteas suffered a heartbreaking loss in the semi-final to New Zealand. De Villiers has cited this loss as a huge strain on his mind and what led to him shockingly announcing his retirement from international cricket in 2018.
Though he tried to make a comeback to South Africa's side for the 2019 World Cup, things didn’t materialize. He continued to play franchise cricket in the meantime, before retiring from all cricket after IPL 2021.
More than two years after his last professional match, at the 2021 IPL, de Villiers told Melinda Farrell in Wisden Cricket Monthly about an eye injury he had sustained not too long before his retirement.
"Communication wasn’t good enough there"- AB de Villiers reveals why he retired so early
He said: “My youngster accidentally kicked me in my eye with his heel. I started really losing vision in the right eye. When I got the surgery done the doctor actually asked me, ‘How in the world did you play cricket like this?’. Luckily my left eye did a decent job for the last two years of my career.”
De Villiers also owned up on how he wanted to make a comeback for the Proteas for the 2019 World Cup. But revealed the reason why he didn’t reverse his retirement decision.
He said: “Covid certainly played a role, there’s no doubt about it. From an international perspective, the 2015 World Cup hurt big time. It took me a while to get over that and then, when I got back into the side and I was ready to commit, I didn’t feel the same culture that I really needed at that time.
I often found myself thinking, I don’t know, eh? Could this be the end of my career? I didn’t even really want to play IPL or anything else. I got away from everything in 2018 and then decided to push one more time with a bit of Test cricket, to try and beat India and Australia over here, and then I’ll call it. I didn’t want any spotlight on me. I just wanted to say, ‘I had a great time, thank you very much’.”
(Wisden inputs)
