The perfect solo act: how Kagiso Rabada knocked down Rohit, Kohli and sucker-punched India

Kagiso Rabada walked onto the stage, found that his band had not turned up. So he decided to be the band himself. He was the leading and backing vocalist, on the drums and on the guitar, the one-man chorus and the headbanger. The music he strummed was both delightful and intimidating.

The rest of the band merely watched. The most experienced of his bowling accomplice was Marco Jansen, who was wastefulness personified; the debuting Nandre Burger withered after a fiery two-over burst with the new-ball, whereupon he strayed onto the pads of India’s right-handed batsmen; the head-band flaunting Gerard Coetzee barely whopped up the aggression he is capable of producing. The trio looked like hurriedly trimmed offcuts of a slick, shining blazer that was Rabada.

He was a one-man solution to all of South Africa’s riddles. When Rohit Sharma seemed to have gathered a measure of his length, he pounded a short ball; the surprised Sharma instinctively hooked the ball straight to the chest of the deep fine-leg fielder. The stroke was injudicious; but Rabada drew indiscretion from Rohit. With the ball hooping at the corners, Rabada, the wise and well-travelled bowler he is, knew that a change of length could startle him and could draw a false response. His first spell was all doom and menace—the red ball of fury traversing unpredictable paths. Virat Kohli and Shreyas Iyer were content guarding their wickets. But for the greasy palms of Jansen at backward point, he could have expelled Iyer too in his first spell that read 7-2-15-1, when India were bargaining four runs an over from Rabada’s profligate colleagues.

Every time India turned ascendant, stitching a partnership, Rabada would pounce and pinch the advantage. The post-lunch spell was one for the ages, when he hit the peak notes, when he reduced batsmen to mere puppets dancing to his deathly tunes. He manufactured a wobble-seamed thunderbolt to blast the stumps of Iyer. In the build-up, he would let the ball fly off hard length, the bounce lulling Iyer to the back-foot. Then he unfurled the wobble-seamer, which didn’t bounce as much and snaked onto the stumps. The wicket was not a trick of the pitch; but the deception of a high-grade bowler.

Eleven balls later, he would unpack the killer blow. Kohli looked relatively un-fussed in dealing with him, the feet moving decisively back and forth, the hands not feeling for the ball. He seemed in a fine nick to add to his tally of hundreds, before Rabada pitched one ball around off stump. The inward angle suckered Kohli into offering at stroke, before the ball shaped away adequately to kiss his outside edge. There was no magic, but brutal, ruthless precision. The length, line, and degree of movement seemed measured with a geometrician’s compass.

South Africa’s bowler Kagiso Rabada watches on his delivery during the first day of the Test cricket match between South Africa and India, at Centurion Park, South Africa, Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

Rabada can wear the magician’s cape with as much dexterity as he could wield a surgeon’s scalpel. Watching him is both theatre and education. He doesn’t thrill you like an inspired Jasprit Bumrah; or make your heart beat as frantically as Shaheen Shan Afridi can on his good days. He, and his Indian peer Mohammed Shami, would delight you with the polish of their bowling, with the utmost mastery of nuances, a unique blend of skill, athleticism, pace and intuition. He processes situations, and comes up with the best answer. This was so helpful a pitch that he knew he didn’t have to give the muscles of his back a working over. So he did not strain the speed-gun to its limits, rather he seemed to bowl within himself. He knew too much of movement would be futile, so he moved the ball minimally, but with potent minimalism.

Here, thus, was a bowler at the peak of his prowess, in control of every step he makes, in control of his destiny, hurting towards greatness. He was predestined to be a great bowler, no less than a phenom as Dale Steyn would observe when Rabada was barely out of his teens. Rabada, though, would wear lofty praise with humility. After his first 10-for in international cricket, against England in SuperSport Park, he would shyly say: “I would call myself a great only if I could do this for 15 years.”

He has completed half of his 15-year journey; and in those years he has raged numbers that are as spellbinding as any elite bowler of any generation. He picks a wicket of every 39th ball he bowls; that is he strikes once every 6.3 overs. Among all the bowlers who have grabbed 200-plus wickets from 1900, no one has picked wickets at a better frequency. Of those that have picked up 100 or more wickets, only George Lohmann who plied in the 19th century has a better strike rate. In the 109 innings he has bowled, only 10 times has he gone wicketless (three of those came on a hard tour to India, his maiden series too) . He picks a five-for every seventh outing. Needless to say, he has been his country’s finest match-winner since the dismembering of the Steyn-Morne Morkel-Vernon Philander troika. In the 28 games his country has won when he has played, he has snaffled 173 (off 285) wickets at 16.45.

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Often, he had to do the job all by himself, chiefly because of the injury-proneness of Anrich Nortje and Lungi Ngidi, and partly due to a support cast that keeps shuffling, and sometimes does not turn up.Here again, he was dialled to remove Shardul Thakur. He performed the job, thus completing his maiden five-for against India. A one-man band with the perfect solo act.

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