“I don’t have a game or two. We’re one-nil down. There’s no game or two,” Rabada said in Gqeberha.
“I just like to let the game take me. Obviously, I know what I want to do, but the emotions that I’m going to feel, I don’t know,” Rabada said. “Right now, I feel ready. I feel confident. But it’s sport. There’s always some mystery in sport. You don’t know if you’re going to win or you’re going to lose. But I also don’t want to give too many inches. I know what it means for me, and that’s going there and giving my best and trying to get those Australian batters out. And for us to perform as a collective. And then, you just kind of let the game take you.”
Hearing Rabada explain it like this is similar to talking to an artist in flow-state or a yogi post-meditation. He speaks of the trance-like quality of being in the moment, when everything else simply disappears. “When you’re in the game, nothing else matters,” he said. “Of course, the people who are supporting you, the people in the stadium, the people who support South African cricket, your family, your teammates, that matters a lot. But when you’re in the game, nothing else matters.”
Unlike so many modern players who talk tactics and techniques, Rabada’s passion comes from the improvisation that happens when a player knows their game as well as they can, and he is comfortable showing that. “There’s a lot of strategy, of course. Playing for 11 years now, there’s heaps of strategies, heaps of game plan,” he said. “But you still have to allow for the naturalness to come through because I think that’s what actually makes you unique as a cricketer. Especially these days, you look at T20 cricket. Everything is so standardised. There’s so much footage. Everything is extremely technical. You almost know exactly what the bowler is going to do. You know what the batter is going to do and it kind of ruins a bit of your artistic flair. It’s really important to keep your naturalness because that’s what makes you, you.”
So what makes Rabada him? We all know the attributes that have got him 340 Test wickets and labelled the only bona fide superstar in this South Africa team: pace, swing, seam, bounce and the ability to get in and stay in the contest, especially against a side like Australia.
At Lord’s 15 months ago, he took nine wickets in the World Test Championship final against this opposition and was a key protagonist in South Africa winning the mace. In 2018, when South Africa beat Australia for the first time at home since readmission, Rabada was the series’ leading bowler with 23 wickets at 19.26, and he also set the tone with his shoulder brush on Steven Smith at St George’s Park. Eight years and a severe injury later, Rabada is not the same player, but that doesn’t mean he will go soft on Australia.
“That [the Smith incident] is just the emotion of the game. It’s about playing within the rules. As athletes, you want to go out and express yourself. There’s no hate off the field or any of that. It’s just a bunch of top-performing athletes who’ve got testosterone to burn. That’s what it is. It’s the heat of the moment,” he said. “But now, you have to take into consideration the rules that have been put in place regarding viewers who are watching the game and keeping the game in a good light. That’s understandable. But you need characters in sports. Of course you do.”
In hindsight, that may be something South Africa lacked in Durban. Anrich Nortje enjoyed a strong comeback to Test cricket after a more than three-and-a-half-year absence, and Wiaan Mulder showed what he can do with the new ball, but Marco Jansen, who is notoriously nervy, still shies away from main-character energy.
With Rabada set to return, Test captain Temba Bavuma expects the mood to change. “The bowlers, they feed massively off him. He leads the attack in everything that he does and it brings an extra level of confidence to the unit. Whether he’s on the field, whether he’s off the field, there’s always benefit. You mentioned the aura. There’s a lot of belief in KG and a lot of the guys rub off that,” he said. “For us, it’s also [about] not putting any more expectation that we have on any other player. KG will do what he does and all the other guys as well should look to do what they need to do for the team.”
That was also missing in Durban where, with two spinners on a flat deck, South Africa ran out of bite to finish off an Australia line-up that was 124 for 6 but went on to score 390.
Was Rabada, who was watching from the dressing room, itching to either get on the field and help his team-mates or offer advice? “It’s a balance. You don’t want to over-flood the guys with information but whenever someone needs some sort of tip or exchange of information, then I’m always there,” he said. “You have to trust the guys. They’ve been playing for a while now and they know what they need to do to get the best out of themselves. But as someone who’s been here in the team for quite some time, if I really have something to say, then I’ll say it. But that’s very seldom.”
Instead, Rabada spent his time getting match-fit after sustaining a hamstring injury in winter training. It was one of six hamstring niggles to affect South Africa’s attack, leading to a pre-series mini-crisis that only Rabada has come through. Lungi Ngidi, Kwena Maphaka, Ottneil Baartman, Lutho Sipamla and Tony de Zorzi are all still recovering but Rabada, who seems to have studied the causes and effects of what happened, is ready for a return.
Though he described the injury as serious, it was not as bad as initially feared. “I didn’t feel extremely dysfunctional or whatever. It was more about getting it to heal so that I can play at full intensity and not to prolong or keep reoccurring,” he said. “That the main focus of getting back. It’s a long cricket summer and lots of cricket to be played. The timing of it wasn’t too bad if you ask me.I wasn’t distraught or it was just a bit of a flag to say, how am I keeping up with conditioning my body? What sort of changes do I need to make to try and mitigate the risk of injury? And yeah, just looking at it from a holistic perspective.”
Rabada understands that age and the demands of the cricket calendar mean he needs to pay extra attention to his conditioning. “There’s a lot of research that goes into it, especially these days when you’re playing so much cricket and at a high intensity,” he said. “The older you get as well, the more you’re going to have to train because your body slows down a lot more. And the more you have to look into the one-percenters of how you’re going to recover. There has to be a great deal of work done off the field so that you can perform on the field. And then all the other stuff, like recovery, diet. These days, everything is so scientific. You try to be perfect, but you’re not going to be obviously. It’s just about weighing up all those one-percenters and seeing how much you can actually do to prevent injury.”
Watching Rabada go about his work over the last 10 days has been a lesson in progressive rehabilitation. He started off bowling off two paces in Durban and was back to what looked like full intensity on Friday in Gqeberha. That Rabada is physically ready seems clear but more importantly, he is mentally ready for a match he says the team as a whole “understand the magnitude of.”
At the same time, they need to keep perspective. “You don’t want to look too far ahead, otherwise you’ll drive yourself crazy. You just want to take it one step at a time,” Rabada said. “Of course, we understand the magnitude of this game, but it’s not about letting it control you. It’s just realising what’s in front of us. If you don’t get a kick out of it, then maybe it’s time to retire and hang the boots up. There’s definitely an urge to want to go and play and give it our best shot.”
South Africa’s ability to bounce back has become part of the national DNA and though they do need to look at why they get themselves into situations they need to bounce back from, now is not the time for it. Over the next week, they have to channel the resilience that has defined their recent success and look to level the contest. “We know that we can do it, we’ve proven it to ourselves before,” Rabada said. “But it’s also, just leaving some space as well. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You can’t think about what might happen or what might not happen. We’ve just got to do what we know we can do.”
Firdose Moonda is Cricinfo’s senior correspondent for Africa and women’s cricket