No stopping confident van der Merwe
Roelof van der Merwe didn't hold back in this innings but there was no desperation in his game
Abhishek Purohit in Hyderabad
26-Sep-2011

Roelof van der Merwe has now hurt Kolkata Knight Riders twice in a week • AFP
At times, a batsman takes so much control over the flow of a game that
even a partisan crowd is stunned into silent acceptance of an inevitable
defeat. That moment arrived in the tenth over of Somerset's chase when
Roelof van der Merwe, who had already brutalised his way to 62 off 30, got
a bouncer from Jacques Kallis.
van der Merwe's response was to arch back
and guide it over the wicketkeeper. He ended up playing the shot so
delicately that the ball went to the fine leg boundary. There was a gasp
from the crowd as it realised decisively that Kolkata Knight Riders had
run into a batsman so confident in his approach that there was no stopping
him.
It was that kind of innings from van der Merwe. He is usually not one to
hold back but there is also, almost always, a sense of desperation to his
hitting. He didn't hold back today either but importantly, the desperation
was absent. From the moment he came in, there was a sense that he was
going to go after the bowling, and that he was going to get away with it.
This made him even more dangerous, as he managed to inflict irreversible
damage by the time he was dismissed in the 14th over.
In the second-wicket partnership of 105 between van der Merwe and Peter
Trego, Trego's contribution was 23. He didn't need to anything other than
get van der Merwe at the right end. The first four overs of the stand, all
against spin, went for 43 with van der Merwe finding the boundary seven
times. Gautam Gambir even brought Brett Lee back for an over but by then
van der Merwe had gathered too much steam to be reined in.
He later admitted that the knock was much more than his usual frenetic
cameos. "I felt that it was one of my more controlled innings upfront," he
said. He is aware of the active role he has to play at No.3 in the
absence of Craig Kieswetter and Jos Buttler and gave it everything.
Whatever the Knight Riders threw at him, the boundaries just kept coming.
He played the late cut, he drove over cover, he whipped over midwicket, he
even reverse-swept for six. That last shot brought a playful intervention
from his captain Alfonso Thomas at the media briefing. "Don't encourage
him," Thomas told a reporter who asked van der Merwe how he had managed to
play the shot. "It was maybe just a rush of blood to upset the field a
bit; luckily it worked but won't be playing it too much," van der Merwe
said.
When the deft upper cut was mentioned, van der Merwe said with a straight
face that he was "just trying to get out of the way" of the ball. But the
joke was on the Knight Riders. After a flowing 40 against them four days
ago, van der Merwe had again managed to hurt them, for the second game
running.
Abhishek Purohit is an editorial assistant at ESPNcricinfo