Simnikiwe Xabanisa | World Cup presents Quinton de Kock with last chance at cricket immortality

In the same way that Floyd Mayweather's flawless boxing record was a few 1980s-style brawls from legitimising his protestations to being the greatest of all time, Quinton de Kock lacks a match-winning innings or two in a knockout game at ICC tournament level to cement his legacy as a South African cricket great.

De Kock's abrupt yet unsurprising retirement - in recent years he's given the impression that playing international cricket has become an onerous chore - from One Day Internationals (ODI) at 30, an age when batsmen usually enter their prime, has hastened the need to make a judgement call on the greatness of the career of one of the more naturally gifted South African players of his generation. The pending World Cup in India, which will be his last international tournament before said retirement, suddenly looms as the casting vote.

An expressive, stroke-making batsman able to caress as well as violate the ball to the boundary, De Kock has never been half as eloquent off the field as he is on it. But in the immediate aftermath of announcing his decision to call what feels like premature time on a career in which he has scored 6 176 ODI runs (17 centuries and 30 half-centuries) at 44.75 and a strike rate of 95.75, he was pretty articulate about why he was striding off into a sunset comprising of franchise cricket gunslinging and looking after his young family.

To paraphrase, De Kock - who made his List A debut at 16 and had already quit the longest form of the game almost two years ago - said while his identity card placed him at 30, he felt around 40 and was having to resort to having to trick himself into thinking like a 20-year-old to coax the enthusiasm from his performances after 145 appearances in ODIs alone.