Sunrisers Hyderabad's Heinrich Klaasen hit a big shot in their Indian Premier League match against the Rajasthan Royals.
Image: Noah Seelam / AFP
The famous words of former Springboks coach Jacques Nienaber during the 2023 Rugby World Cup, "they can script anything they want; at the end of the day, we decide what the movie will look like," come to mind when thinking of the version of Heinrich Klaasen that the world has had the pleasure of watching over the last three years.
Down and out after scoring only 66 runs in his first two IPL seasons, where he had stints with the Rajasthan Royals and Royal Challengers Bangalore, many would have written Klaasen off.
"There’s no way he is making his way back to the IPL again; it’s over," many would have said when Klaasen went unsold for three consecutive IPL seasons.
However, the wicketkeeper-batter picked himself up and wrote his own story, as Nienaber would phrase it. After scoring 253 runs at an average of 59 in the 2022 CSA T20 Challenge in Gqeberha, leading the Titans to the final, signs were there that Klaasen had found his groove again.
A year later, the middle-order batter broke into the IPL once again, this time securing a contract with Sunrisers Hyderabad. Since then, Klaasen has gone on to score 961 runs at an average of 44 and has registered a strike rate well over 170 – a set of stats many top batters in the world can only dream of.
As a result, the 33-year-old is now the second-fastest batter to reach 1 000 IPL runs in terms of balls faced, a feat few could have imagined Klaasen achieving after losing his IPL contracts.
One game into the new season, Klaasen has already registered a dominant 14-ball 35 as he continues to prove that he is far ahead of any other middle-order batter in white-ball cricket.
Up next, Klaasen and his Sunrisers Hyderabad teammates will host the Lucknow Super Giants on Thursday, a team that features three South Africans: Aiden Markram, David Miller, and Matthew Breetzke.