Quinton de Kock was one of the star performers when Mumbai Indians (MI) won back-to-back IPL titles in 2019 and 2020, aggregating 529 and 503 runs in the two seasons respectively. His career has gone in all sorts of directions in more recent times, but back with MI for IPL 2026, and back where he belonged, so to say, in Rohit Sharma’s absence against Punjab Kings (PBKS) on Thursday night, it was almost like nothing had changed in the intervening years.
De Kock, playing his first game of the season after Rohit had to sit out with an injury, opened with countrymate Ryan Rickelton, who had been preferred to de Kock till this game, and slammed 112 not out in 60 balls – only the second century this IPL season – hitting eight fours and seven sixes. Aaron Finch put the freedom with which de Kock batted down to being “pretty content with his career” and not really being in a race to prove himself.
“The difference between Quinton De Kock and somebody else coming in in that position, where you’ve been sitting on the bench, is that he’s probably pretty content with his career,” Finch said on ESPNcricinfo’s TimeOut show. “He’s thinking, you know what, I’m going to be back-up to Ryan Rickelton most likely. He gets an opportunity when Rohit gets injured. So he comes in and he’s just relaxed, he’s calm. His heart rate doesn’t seem to be above 60 too often. Nothing seems to faze him.
“So that just goes to show a guy who’s really at peace with where his career’s at compared to somebody else who might think, you know what, I need to get runs today to maybe get another opportunity. So he’s able to be a bit more free-flowing and just back his skill and not get too overawed by that situation or what’s down the track.”
De Kock, now 33, reversed his decision to retire from ODI cricket in September 2025. He had quit Test cricket already, and while he had never officially retired from T20Is, he had not been picked by South Africa for a while after the 2024 T20 World Cup. Then in November 2021, de Kock was back in the South Africa T20I squad, and Rickelton had to make way. And then he was playing at the T20 World Cup earlier this year, even though he was well off his best.
Now, at MI, it’s Rickelton vs de Kock again.
“You didn’t ask me that question when Ryan got that 80 [81] against KKR,” Mahela Jayawardene, the MI head coach, said with a smile when asked after the loss to PBKS why Rickelton and why not de Kock. “These are the margins that we play [with]. I still feel that we are making the right decisions at the right time and going through… yeah, I mean, it’s good to have that competition within the group as well. There’s nothing wrong in that. And once the guys put their hand up and acknowledge those, you know, then we will have a look at it. So it’s good to have that.
“From the first game, you guys asked me: why Ryan, why not Quinny? And there was a reason for it. And when the time was right, we played Quinny and he patiently waited like a good pro and he executed a brilliant innings. It’s great to have that, early doors. We need everyone to be firing like that and have that hunger out there in the middle.”
Rickelton, for the record, has entered double-digits just once since that innings against KKR.
De Kock’s 112, off exactly half the balls in the MI innings, wasn’t even enough to take MI past 200, with Naman Dhir’s 50 from No. 4 at a strike rate of 161.29 – de Kock scored at 186.66 – and Hardik Pandya’s 12 the only other double-digit scores. In the last four overs of their innings, MI only scored 35 runs. De Kock faced ten of those balls and scored just 17 runs. The momentum was lost, but de Kock was responsible for taking them to that point to start with.
“They lost a couple of wickets up front – Rickelton and Suryakumar Yadav – and for the other opener, the experienced one, it’s hard to take on the bowler straightaway because you feel as a batter that I need to play bat deep to get that big score on the board,” Piyush Chawla said. “But he didn’t let the run rate, you know, go down a bit. He was always there. Whenever the ball was there, he was taking his chances.
“He was playing those big shots and putting pressure on the bowlers most of the time. So that was a really key thing for me in this particular innings.”
