New boy is from the old school

There are quite a few trees growing around the main cricket oval at Wynberg Boys High courtesy of Richard Levi. It's a tradition at one of Cape Town's great cricket schools that when a First XI batsman reaches a hundred, a tree goes into the ground.

When he was a pupil there, Levi regularly scored hundreds. Once he even scored a double century, which is unusual for a schoolboy. Legend has it he did it before lunch, but that might just be a schoolboy myth. Be that as it may, there is a Levi forest developing along the boundary.

Yesterday, thousands of miles from the Jacques Kallis Oval at WBH, he was like a mighty oak and the New Zealand bowlers like tree-cutters armed with pen-knives.

He was bold, he was powerful but he was never reckless. You might think that 13 sixes in 67 balls was just slogging. It was not; it was a measured innings revealing mature shot judgment and carried out with the help of a powerful pair of wrists.

Levi might be a child of the T20 generation, but it would be wrong to pigeonhole him as such. He has the potential to be good in all three forms of the game.

So where does this explosive hitting come from? For that we need to go back to the school.

Wynberg Boys High has been consistently producing good cricketers over the years.

There is a culture at the school of playing good cricket and encouraging brave cricket. The first time I saw Levi bat, he was playing brave cricket against old rivals Rondebosch Boys High. After a particularly hard day's work, watching him was therapeutic - along with Rondebosch's famous chocolate cake for tea.

Levi was batting alongside another Wynberg prodigy, Dominic Telo. Levi was bustle and power, a batsman in a hurry; Telo was all elegance and grace. Telo would go on to break Kallis's record for the most runs by a Wynberg first-team player and Levi would break Telo's.

When I saw Kallis at the same age, the great South African was still young and under-powered; he struggled to get the ball off the square. Levi was clearing the boundary.

It is this boundary-clearing that has now become common among Wynberg batsmen. They have a manner of playing that encourages multiple six-hitting, something you seldom see in schoolboy cricket. Wynberg are like that and coach Eric Lefson sets them challenges so that chasing down 270-plus as they recently did against Bishops in one day, became regulation cricket rather than rare, even impossible, cricket.

The cricket schools in Cape Town often play declaration cricket rather than only a set number of overs. Levi is from that tradition, which is why his shot judgment shows such maturity.

And he does it all with a South African-made bat: Bellingham and Smith.