Finding His Range
Matthew Breetzke is getting in stride
Last year I did a piece on Matthew Breetzke exploring his early years. Read here:
The other day I caught up with Matthew and the result is this article. Hope you enjoy it.
Matthew Breetzke went down on one knee, made contact with the ball inside the line of his pads and sent it behind square. That is what Breetzke was doing in the last 23 minutes. Not hitting the ball behind square, but playing the sweep shot. Making contact in line with his front pad, and inside and outside its line.
It's monotonous work. But the monotony of attempting the same, mundane, sweep shot doesn't get to him. Every day of the past week, Breetzke has had the sweep shot practice scheduled, and for each of those days, he has gone through the same motions, with the same level of focus.
When he was younger, his net sessions had the feel of someone in a rage room. Breetzke's intent was to smash every delivery for a six. It felt as if his mission was to prove to himself and others that he was good enough for higher honours. “Those first three years like I was so hungry, I wanted to do well every game and as you know, cricket is not like that. And then when you fail, you sort of you doubt yourself and you want to please everybody. As a youngster everyone's telling you how good you are you want to show them that you are this good,” says Breetzke.
Grey High has a rich cricketing tradition that dates back to 1861. Some of the recognised names from the Gqeberha school include Johan Botha, Colin Ackermann, Wayne Parnell, Dave Nosworthy, Grant Morgan, and Jon-Jon Smuts, but none as exciting as Graeme Pollock. Not until Matthew Breetzke showed up.
Between 2010 and 2012, there were murmurs of Breetzke’s potential. He scored brilliant hundreds and averaged 75 in 2011 and 2012. In 2013 he became the youngest player to pad up for Grey High’s first XI at 15. Breetzke decimated schoolboy attacks and was equally good for Eastern Province, whom he represented at the Khaya Majola Coca-Cola Week three years in a row. It wasn’t long before he was being talked up as a potential addition to the national set-up as Quinton de Kock’s understudy.
But, that didn’t happen. Breetzke put in decent performances after his Under-19 campaign, and there was no call from the national set-up. Then he failed for a few months, and as the lean patch grew longer, doubts crept in. “I think ever since I came out of school, there was a lot of talk about me is going to be the next Protea. And that sort of expectation, I didn't deal with too well, in the first sort of two, three years,” says Breetzke, who found himself questioning whether he wanted to carve a cricket career.
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Ashtead, nestled in the Mole Valley district of Surrey, England, is the sort of place Midsummer Murders could have been shot at. It is a big village with a population of about 14,000 people. This is where Breetzke rediscovered his love for cricket. He joined Ashtead Cricket Club in 2022, after a tough domestic season. His first-class average of 39.81 in the top 100 highest averages of the 2021-22 season, but not good enough to get him into the top 50. In T20s, he averaged 26.81 and had a poor run in List A cricket, where he averaged 12.25.
The journey to Ashtead was a godsend. Breetzke settled into the semi-idyllic life offered by the village. For the first time in six years, Breetzke found himself not consumed by worry and the desire to please everyone. As the overseas pro, everyone looked to him for runs, but the expectation didn't come with insurmountable pressure. Everyone was friendly and accommodating.
“They were a great bunch of guys all sort of similar ages. We played cricket on a Saturday and had beers after the game,” says Breetzke. During the week, Breetzke spent most of his time coaching the junior sides.
When Devon Conway moved to New Zealand from South Africa, he took up a coaching job at local schools as a way to supplement his income from semi-pro cricket. The 32-year-old New Zealand opener found coaching youngsters not only to be therapeutic, but transformative to his game.
“It's actually reiterating some of the points that as a professional player, you sometimes forget, some of the very basics of what actually makes you the player who you are because you're so wound up in your own mind about trying to tackle different other aspects of the game. And then you sometimes forget about the absolute basics. So when you dial it back so much, when you're trying to explain to a kid, how to catch the ball or how to hit the ball, you start reiterating the fundamentals that are actually very key to your success as a player and the way that you should be playing cricket. So that's the thing I really enjoy the most about coaching,” Conway shared with me in 2022.
“My time with Ashtead was actually a big turning point in my career, going over there and living there alone for five months and just finding the love for the game again,” says Breetzke.
Matthew Breetzke is a feel-player. For a long time, how he felt in the nets on the day before the game translated on match-day. If he felt crappy and couldn’t time the ball the day before, he was guaranteed to struggle on match-day. Two years after his Ashtead stint, he is no longer that person.
“It doesn't matter how I feel, I've got little techniques in my mind that help me to get a performance out even when I feel down. Yes, I am a feel player but I think that's sometimes it's a bit of an excuse to say I don't feel well so I can’t perform well. I've tried to change my mind and say no matter how I feel I still want to get a performance out,” says Breetzke.
One of those techniques is self-talk. Out in the middle, Breetzke reminds himself to keep things simple, just watch the ball and play it on its merit. He also reminds himself of why he plays the game. For this, he casts his mind back to the three-year-old Matthew Breetzke who didn’t want to take a break from hitting balls so much that he followed his father to the toilet with ball in hand expecting the older Breetzke to keep throwing balls for him while doing his business. “I fell in love the first day I watched my older brother playing,” he says.
Breetzke is also motivated by extrinsic factors. On the 28th of January 2024, he picked up, drove and smashed back-to-back sixes and a four to bring up his first 50 of the 2024 edition of the SA20. In celebration, he pointed to the camera and put his index finger on his lips. The message was simple: stop running your mouth. Before the match, a member of the opposition had said Breetzke was only good for 30s and 40s and was unable to score big.
“Before the game, I was just low on energy, and I didn't I wasn't that keen to play and then I heard that and I was sort of, I was like, ‘Okay, I'm on the here today. And I'm gonna I'm gonna shut him up,’” says Breetzke. “I'm quite big on proving people wrong. When there's a bit of negative talk about me, I get some different blood in me and I usually put out a performance.”
It’s no surprise that one of his favourite innings came in his first game of his Grade 12 year. The previous year, Breetzke had been overlooked for the SA Under-19 team. That omission stung. He had been part of the U19 side in Grade 10 and had pushed himself to be picked in 2015. In his first match of 2016, Breetzke purposefully strode onto the Pollock Oval and broke the Grey High record with an imperious 184. A week later, he scored another century to break another Grey record. On 23 January 2016, Breetzke had the most centuries by a Grey High student - a record he extended and still holds.
The teenage Breetzke prepared for those matches by smiting the ball so hard it almost burned through the nets after leaving his bat. The older Breetzke is more self-aware. Before moving on to work on his sweep shot, he had been working on his pull shot. As he did with the sweep, the session was about doing the basics right over and over again. Before that, he had been working on hitting the ball down the ground.
“I have also been working on the basics of hitting the ball nice and late and keeping my head still,” he says as he takes guard.
Matthew Breetzke is just finding his range.
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Thanks for reading. Until next time… - CS