The ball cracks off AB de Villiers’ bat. There is no real hint of violence; just a marriage of beauty and brutality.

De Villiers’ every shot, breathtakingly crisp and yet flying off his bat with alacrity, feels like a riposte to any who still deride T20 as slogging. The 40,000 at the ground intoxicated by his show are too mesmerised to think of such questions.

Welcome to watching AB at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore: an experience that, both on and off the field, feels like the apogee of T20 cricket.

Six follows six, each thundered more crisply than the last. There are slog sweeps against spin, balls flicked 100 metres over long on like a topspin forehand - as a child, de Villiers beat Kevin Anderson, now the men’s tennis world No8 - and drives propelled flat over extra cover. De Villiers seems to have a preternatural sense of where the ball will be delivered and how he will hit it. After each six, the screen flashes up with a reverential sign: ‘AB Dynamite’ or ‘A dmirable B rilliant D azzling’.

Rise of the unicorn

The NBA basketball league is in thrall to its ‘unicorns’. This new breed of players are unshackled by the old compromises between tall players and smaller, agile ones. Instead, new-age players like Kevin Durant can do it all, combining the technique of point guards - who run games like deep-lying football midfielders - with the athleticism of power forwards, and so redefine the parameters of their sport.