Lhuan-dre and the Two Ton Club

Lhuan-dre Pretorius is Flavour of the Month in South African cricket. Again. He has been each month this year. He only turned 19 on 27^th of March this year, and first came to (relatively dim) light for South Africa Under-19s, including a quality Under-19 World Cup in South Africa in 2024. At that point he was already inevitably ‘destined for higher honours’, and #AllTheOtherUsualCliches. He ramped up the lux meter massively during the SA20 in January – a strike-rate of 166 will do that, before returning to the dimmer lights of the CSA One-day Series and CSA Four-day Series. And he kept scoring runs there too. He followed up his maiden first-class innings of 120 for Titans v Warriors at Gqeberha in December with another hundred in his second first-class appearance (having belted the white ball for 713 runs in the interim), and a third (114 off 209 balls; ‘proper’ batting for those of us who are old school) in the final last week against the Lions. Before that, he even bothered to score two one-day hundreds. A three-format player! It was no surprise that he received his maiden call-up to the South African A team for their upcoming tour of West Indies.