Family at hand at AB de Villiers' Bangalore homecoming

AB de Villiers Senior only knew one ball. "The one shaped like this," he said to the media in Bangalore, drawing an oval in the air to illustrate a rugby ball.

AB de Villiers Junior does not know any balls yet. At barely three months old, all he knows is: "My favourite cricketer is my daddy" - or at least that's what it says on the outfit he was in.

But the middle AB de Villiers is the Goldilocks. His knowledge of balls is just right.

"I used to think lying in bed at night, 'I hope Ernie Els will see this lad, because he's striking the golf ball so magnificently.' Later on there was tennis," AB senior remembered. But his wife, Millie, knew their son was never going to enter a single-person sport because he was "very much a team guy".

"He's not that one who will do very well in individual sport. He will miss the guys around him. He actually made the decision based on that as well," Millie de Villiers said. "He loved his friends, the house was always full of his mates. They were always playing games."

The decision came down to picking cricket over rugby and carving out a career that was not quite what his father, a doctor, imagined. "Coming from an academic family I would have loved him to have a degree," AB senior said. "But this is much better."

"This" has now grown to 100 Test matches and de Villiers' parents, along with wife and new-born son were all in attendance at what even AB senior called a "second home".

All the de Villiers were greeted like family at the Chinnaswamy Stadium. AB senior and Millie had the press corps' full attention even as South African tumbled. By then AB, the player, was already out, sent off by an adoring crowd who could not stop calling his name. "Every year he's here, and he's becoming one of your guys," Millie said, before AB senior added: "We must just teach him to speak Indian."

On Saturday, the talking came from de Villiers' bat alone. For the second match in succession, he top-scored during a first-innings collapse but was denied the fairytale of a hundred in his hundredth match.

"I'm a bit disappointed, but that's how cricket goes. I think he was chasing his hundred because wickets fell one after the other," AB senior said. "But I think that score today was more important to him than making his hundred." The man himself would agree.