Sikandar Raza had done well in the seven deliveries he bowled to Dewald Brevis, conceding just seven runs in seven balls. Two singles, a four, a bye, and three dots. On the eighth ball, the spinner decided to surprise Brevis with a bouncer.
Many batters might have been taken off-guard. But Brevis read the body cues and was ready for a short ball. He rocked back and sent it into the stands over deep midwicket. It was his second six of the innings, and Brevis did not strike another maximum in the match. But that was immaterial to the result, because Jordan Hermann and Connor Esterhuizen had done well enough at the top to set South Africa on course for a winning total.
The Namibia Cricket ground surface was not an easy one to hit sixes off, but Brevis had made it look easy during the week-long tournament. The six off Raza’s bowling was Brevis’ 16th of the Namibia T20 tri-Series which featured Zimbabwe, South Africa and the hosts, Namibia. Lhuan-dre Pretorius had the second-most with 11, while Connor Esterhuizen rounded off the players with double-digit sixes with 10.
This is not a one-off scenario. More often than not, Brevis will hit more sixes than his teammates in matches and series. He is quickly becoming South Africa’s six-hitting machine.
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Thirty-three balls. That is how long Graeme Smith took before he struck his and South Africa’s first six in T20 cricket. They called it 20-20 cricket back then. It was October 2005 and South Africa were playing New Zealand in their maiden T20 International. Smith went on to strike 25 more sixes in his 33-innings T20I career.
Five years later, he would feature in a match against West Indies at North Sound. He faced 18 deliveries, scored 15 runs, but didn’t hit a six. No one was surprised. Smith struck a maximum every 29.6 balls he faced. Smith’s strike rate of 127.5 looks pedestrian now, but it was decent for its era. In the same match, David Miller, who was making his debut, lofted one off the fifth ball he faced.
Miller refined the art of hitting for South African cricket. He made Miller Time a thing and got everyone reciting the maxim he had inherited from his father, “if it’s in the V it’s in the tree, if it’s in the arc it’s out of the park.” Miller had children and grown-ups lifting banners that proclaimed Miller Time each time he hoisted the ball over the ropes.
As of 6 September 2026, Miller was South Africa’s all-time leader in six-hitting. He strikes a maximum every 14 deliveries he faces. That’s two sixes for each one Smith lofted. Miller has hoisted 139 sixes in 121 innings across 16 years of international cricket.
Brevis was two years old in 2005. He was learning how to hold a bat the right way when Smith was trying to get to grips with the new format. In 2006, he was facing deliveries from family members indoors with a junior bat that looked a little too big for him. Most kids that age are legside dominant. It is the natural way of swinging the bat. Though untrained, Brevis possessed a swing that allowed him to hit down the ground.
Brevis was seven when Miller was introducing himself to the T20I audience. That was a year before he was introduced to hard ball cricket. His first experience was in a tournament of sorts at Jubaweni Camp. He hauled home bags full of runs, which included more sixes than Smith and Miller’s combined lot on their T20I debuts.
However, unlike Smith and Miller, Brevis needed more time before he banged his first maximum in T20Is. Three innings, to be accurate. That sounds better when we mention that the 23-year-old faced a total of 11 balls across three matches, before he took off. Since then, he has been untouchable. Brevis hits a six in every 7.8 balls he faces.
Three years and seven days after his debut, Brevis marched into the top five six-hitters in T20Is for South Africa. Brevis is now joint-fourth on the list of players with the most sixes for the Proteas. He is tied with JP Duminy, who crunched 71 sixes in 75 innings in his 12-year T20I career. He did it in less than half the innings and from almost a third of the deliveries Duminy faced.
He is a dozen sixes behind the third-placed Aiden Markram, who 83 maximums in 73 innings. What makes this comparison impressive is that Brevis has faced 769 fewer deliveries than the Proteas captain. If Miller refined six-hitting for South Africa, Brevis is its evolution. More importantly, the maximums represent the impact Brevis has had on the format in his budding career.
Former India men’s T20I analyst Himanish Ganjoo furnished us with stats collected from T20Is, IPL, SA20, PSL, CPL, and BBL from January 2024 to 3 September 2026. They reveal that Brevis has the sixth-highest sum of runs above expectation (RAE) in T20 cricket in that period.
Brevis has a healthy mean RAE of 22.47. This means that the 23-year-old makes 22.47 runs more than the average batter every 100 balls (the average batter will be facing the same overs and has the wickets left, dealing with similar lines and lengths, and ground conditions).
Hitting the ball out of the ground is not a recently acquired skill for Brevis, he has been doing it from an early age. He raised a storm on the Andre van der Walt Oval at Waterkloof as a Grade 10 learner. Brevis lofted a few balls over the clubhouse and also rocketed one flat six that shattered through one of the small windows on the ground floor. The innings was his first for Affies’ first team at Waterkloof, but it wasn’t his first visit to the institution. One time, when he was in primary school, Brevis heaved a couple of deliveries onto the roof of the clubhouse in a match for Hennopspark against Cornwall Hill. Even at that age, he was scoring above expectation.
If we looked his runs above expectation per innings, we understand why Shukri Conrad, the South Africa coach, said that he didn’t want Brevis to change. Brevis adds 4.05 more than the average batter per knock. In a format of small margins, that could be the difference between winning and losing.
It is easy for most batters to achieve a high RAE over a short period. This is why Brevis’ numbers are so impressive. They stand up over a slightly extended period.
If Brevis gave South African T20 cricket a jolt, he gave most fans a shock to the system. They typed their meltdowns on social media, complaining that his approach was immature. He didn’t play according to the match situation, they said. They are more comfortable with a player with an average of 40 and a strike rate of 130.
But Conrad was not bothered. In February 2026, the coach stated that Brevis was the kind of player that will break your hearts one day and do something incredibly special the next.
“Consistency is really not something we look for in T20 cricket, we want an impact and I think Dewald is that player that can make an impact on the game single-handedly, and so can other players… He’s an X-factor player for us,” Conrad shared.
Brevis used to turn out for a club called Laudium CC. He joined them when he was 12. Laudium was underfunded and didn’t attract the best players in the province. That forced him to learn to carry the responsibilities of ensuring his team’s success early. In 2021, Brevis didn’t feature in all but one of Laudium’s matches, so they lost more than they won. The match he featured in was a must-win contest; defeat would have resulted in their relegation from the premier league.
True to form, Brevis carted bowlers all around the park. He batted Laudium to victory in style. The then-18-year-old launched three sixes over the cover region and lifted one above the fielder at third. The other four were on the leg side. One crashed into the sliding windows by the bar, startling drinking patrons. Three flew into the mid-wicket-cow corner region. He also carved 17 fours.
That was his only match for them for the season. Despite that, he struck the joint fourth-most sixes of the season. Brevis’ sixes translate into high impact. In the present, he has the sixth-highest impact on the list of players who have faced a minimum of 300 balls in T20 cricket since 2024.
He is the only South African in the top 10 list of players with the highest impact per 100 balls in the format.
Heinrich Klaasen had a blistering surge from 2023/24 until his international retirement. The middle order batter was a monumental loss to South Africa when he hung his gear. He has continued to tear bowling attacks apart, despite playing with a troublesome shoulder. Klaasen is eighth on the list of players with the highest impact per innings.
Brevis, who is outpacing the former Proteas star on the number of sixes for South Africa by quite a distance, is a spot lower than Klaasen on impact per innings.
There is a high likelihood that Brevis will end his career with the most sixes for South Africa. He is 68 maximums behind Miller, who has taken more 121 innings to get there. Quinton de Kock, who is in second place will push the figure close to or beyond 150, but his rate of a six every 16 balls will not put the number beyond Brevis, who is moving at twice De Kock’s speed.
Graeme Smith was 30 when he played his 33rd T20I innings. It was his last. Brevis was 23 when he reached the 33 T20I mark, and he is only getting started.