Kepler Wessels: Biography, Age, Records, Height, Achievements, Family, and Career Statistics

Kepler Wessels was born in Bloemfontein on September 14, 1957. Kepler Christoffel Wessels is a legendary figure in modern South African cricket lore as the first captain of the national team and the only player in history to have played for both Australia and South Africa. Wessels, a left-handed opening batsman, was the coach of the Indian Premier League’s Chennai Super Kings in 2008. Wessels’s older sister’s then-boyfriend, Johan Volsteedt, introduced him to cricket when he was six. On his weekly Sunday visits to the Wessels, Volsteedt instructed him in the fundamentals of cricket and began playing the game with him. A few years later, Volsteedt took over as cricket coach at Grey College, Bloemfontein, where Wessels was a student-athlete. He played tennis throughout the winter and was so successful that the University of Houston offered him a $25,000 scholarship to attend college for four years. This was in 1973 when he was the top under-16 player in South Africa. At the tender age of 16, he made his first-class debut for Orange Free State, batting in the ninth spot and scoring 32 runs. Test veteran Colin Bland captained his team. He began his professional career at 18 by opening the batting for Sussex in England.

Wessels was a cricketer for the Australian World Series Cricket Team that Kerry Packer chose in the late ’70s. Wessels joined the WSC because he was a South African without much of a shot at playing Test cricket for his country.

Biography of Kepler Wessels

Real Name: Kepler Christoffel Wessels
Other/Nickname: Wessels, Kepler
Profession: Australian cricketer
Famous for: Aggressive
Best Performance: 2/16, Benson & Hedges World Series Cup at Adelaide Oval, Adelaide on Jan 28, 1985
Net Worth: $200,000
Salary: $ 4,00,000
Monthly Income: $ 32,000
Website Url: N/A
Instagram Handle: N/A

Physical Status

Height: N/A
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Personal Life:

Date Of Birth: Sept 14, 1957
Place Of Birth: Bloemfontein, Orange Free State
Nationality: South African and Australian
Hometown: Bloemfontein, Orange Free State
School: N/A
College: Grey College
Highest Education qualification: N/A

Family Statistics:

Marital Status: Married
Wife: Sally Wessels
Children: Riki Wessels, Rebecca Wessels
Parents: N/A
Siblings: Wessel Wessels
Religion: N/A
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Career Statistics-

Test Debut: vs. England at The Gabba, Nov 26, 1982

ODI Debut: vs. New Zealand at Melbourne Cricket Ground, Jan 09, 1983

T20 Debut: Not to play

IPL Debut: Not to play

Achievements –

During his ODI career, Wessels won a lot of player awards, like “Man of the Series” for the 1983 ODI series against the West Indies and “Man of the Match” for his “81 not out” against Australia in the 1992 World Cup. These are just two examples.
With his 118 against an Indian team led by Mohammad Azharuddin at Johannesburg, he became the first to score a Test hundred for two countries. He is still the only one to have done it.
His Test career totals of 2,788 runs at 41.00 with six hundred are respectable, despite a decline in his late innings.
In 109 One-Day Internationals, he scored 3,367 runs at an average of 34.35, including one century and 26 half-centuries.
In his mercenary career, he played for seven different First-Class teams in South Africa, Australia, and England. He also played Tests for two other countries. In 316 games, he scored just under 25,000 runs and made 66 hundred.

Here are some lesser-known facts about

Wessels joined the Cricket Australia Supplementary Referee Panel in 2018. As of 2020, he is the Director of Coaching for the South Brisbane District Cricket Club and the First Grade Coach.
He was never out for a duck during his 105 innings played in ODIs. No other former player has ever accomplished this during a career longer than 40 innings.
Kepler Wessels is a rare player in that he has represented two different countries in international competitions.
Not long after the 1985 Test match against New Zealand, Kepler Wessels announced his retirement, citing his disappointment with Australian cricket. He had no idea that six years later, he’d be back playing Test Cricket, this time for his own country.
Wessels has had extraordinary athletic ability from an early age. By age 12, he was a top schoolboy swimmer in the province and a rugby union player for the primary school team in the Free State.