Quinton must remember to score the other 50 runs

Quinton de Kock deserves every slap on the back he would have received for being named among the SA Cricket Annual's "Five Cricketers of the Year" yesterday.

Only fellow honouree David Miller rivals De Kock as the freshest blast of air to hit the ODI scene in recent seasons.

The most impressive of De Kock's stats is not that, in 27 ODI innings, he has scored 1190 runs at an average of 44.07 and a strike rate of 90.49. Nor is it that he has drilled a touch more than half of those runs in boundaries. Instead, it is that he is still only 21.

But, despite the rapid and sustained rise of his star, De Kock will want to rediscover an ability he seems to have mislaid: his knack for finishing what he starts.

In his first 19 ODI innings, De Kock passed 50 five times. Each time he converted those efforts into centuries.

In his next eight knocks in the format, De Kock made it halfway to a hundred three times. Not once did he go on to three figures.

The trend has continued in the opening exchanges of this season's franchise first-class competition. De Kock has had four innings for the Lions and only once has he not reached 50. But, as yet this nascent summer, he has not completed a century.

No pattern presents itself in De Kock's most recent dismissals. He has been yorked by right-arm fast bowler Marchant de Lange, caught at deep midwicket off slow left- armer Roelof van der Merwe, caught behind off right-arm medium pacer Dillon du Preez, and clean bowled trying to reverse sweep off-spinner Werner Coetsee.

It would be unfair to ask overly critical questions of the performance of a player who has passed 50 in exactly half of the last 16 innings he has had in all formats and at all levels.

But harder task-masters will ask what has been happening to the other 50 runs, particularly as De Kock has set himself such high standards.

One of the hard bastards, it seems, is Neil McKenzie, who playfully posted on a Lions social media page at the weekend: "Quinton, you know you're allowed to get more than 50 for the Lions, don't you?"

Not that Lions captain Stephen Cook had complaints about De Kock.

"Nothing comes to mind that is obvious about his dismissals," Cook said yesterday. "If anything, he's got out playing for the team when he could probably have got himself a nice, quiet 60 not out."

De Kock's unvarnished honesty and directness has earned him points with the public and the media since he made his international debut in December, 2012. How had he changed since then?

"He's still lighthearted and pretty chilled, and he always has a smile on his face," Cook said. "But his insight and his ability to read the game have increased since he joined the Proteas."

Heino Kuhn, Justin Ontong and Stiaan van Zyl were the other "Cricketers of the Year".