When your goosebumps cannot stop exploding, you know you’ve heard something special. Dewald Brevis, already a special person in our MI universe, is on a mission to get is tearing up.

“It feels like my blood feels blue, the way I've been taken care of, it's a big thing for me,” said Brevis in an interview with Cricbuzz. “The MI family makes me feel like I belong. They backed me at a very young age after the under-19 World Cup and gave me a platform. And I'll always be grateful to that. I'll always be true to that. So, I'll run through a wall for them. And the bond is very special.”

Rewind to 2022. The under-19 World Cup is in progress. There’s a certain batter who’s giving major AB de Villiers feels with his batting. He’s lapping the ball around, playing reverse-scoops, slogging them deep over cow corner. He’s only 17. A few days later, at the IPL auction, he triggers a proper bidding war.

CKS and PBKS want him. From his base price of 20 lakhs INR, they raise him to 1.6cr INR. Mumbai Indians jump in, Punjab withdraw, but CSK don’t relent. Not until 3cr INR, and not until he becomes the highest-paid under-19 player.

He is Dewald Brevis. And he is ours. It has to be one of our better wins over CSK! And immediately in his first season, he showed us just why all the hype around him made sense, smoking Rahul Chahar for four consecutive sixes, each one longer and fiercer than the previous one. He continued his good work a few months later at MI Cape Town, and announced his arrival to the world some more with a stunning, once-in-a-lifetime knock of 162 off just 55 balls in South Africa’s domestic T20 circuit.

However, come IPL 2023, with Mumbai Indians having found a set combination, he was forced to warm the bench for the entire season. But Brevis, being Brevis, used the time spent on the sidelines to work on his game with Head Coach, Mark Boucher. “It's tough dealing with your emotions when you are not playing. It can be tough. But I worked on a lot of things with coach Mark Boucher. It's been a year for me playing at a higher level, if the opposition analyzes me as a batsman, it's important to have a few tricks up my sleeve to foil their plans,” he said.

Even Robin Peterson, General Manager at MI Cape Town and the Head Coach at MI New York, sees the difference in Brevis’ game. “I think at the U19 level because he was so much better than everybody else that he could just thrive on talent and instinct. He didn't need to think too much. He could just play and intimidate opponents at his age group level. The minute he went up, he was competing with men basically as a schoolboy," said Peterson.

"Now he talks a lot about visualization around his game. His recovery and getting his body ready to perform at its optimum. He understands part of your mental prep is understanding the opposition, you coming up against the conditions you are playing in, how they may try and combat you. These are conversations that he has on a regular basis which he might not have had a year ago."

Brevis now is with the MI New York camp for the inaugural MLC season, and surely, SURELY, he’d be dying to get out there onto the cricket pitch and show the world his progress. Trust us, we are dying to see him tonk them into the stands with that usual swagger, without bothering to look up.