Rabada set to be ripped from series script

A decision on Rabada’s hearing is expected on what looms as an irredeemably blue Monday morning.

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE at St George’s Park

IT takes a special performance from a special player to shift the focus from the extra special AB de Villiers when he’s in full, glorious cry.

De Villiers’ undefeated 126 on the third day of the second test between South Africa and Australia at St George’s Park shimmered with enough incandescence to shine a light even under the rocks from whence those miseries in their Sonny Bill Williams masks have crawled.

But somebody did manage to steal De Villiers’ thunder. His name is Kagiso Rabada.

Rabada has bowled better and taken more wickets than the 3/38 he claimed in Australia’s second innings on Sunday; case in point is the 5/96 he took in the first innings on Friday.

But he has never shown more mongrel, more grunt, more edge, more nastiness, more likeness to Mack the Knife than on Sunday.

Even the rare delivery that might not have threatened became a grenade once it left his hand.

Like the one David Warner defended, perfectly sensibly, towards midwicket.

The ball was timed at 151 kilometres per hour — the fastest of the match — and so it cracked off the bat with zeal.

Rabada exploded after it, dived full length, spinning like a low-flying, horizontal figure skater as he did so, and came up with the goods in a menacingly cocked throwing arm.

Four overs later Rabada removed Warner with a rattlesnake of a delivery that straightened after pitching to snipe through the gate and nail his off stump.

As Warner walked past, Rabada roared a one-word farewell. What he said was difficult to know but it wasn’t a dinner invitation.

With that we were reminded of the real world, that place Rabada seems to be struggling to come to terms with.

That he will probably be ripped from the script of this series’ compelling drama on Monday is a shocking thought.

If South Africa go on to win this match, and they should, it will be in no small way Rabada’s doing.

But he was set to attend a hearing with match referee Jeff Crowe after stumps on Sunday at which his fate for bumping shoulders with Steve Smith after he dismissed the Australian captain on Friday will be decided.

What matters is whether the contact between the players was avoidable. It was.

Rabada has five demerit points hanging over him. Sunday’s hearing could add three or four more.

Eight points would get him banned for the last two tests.

A decision is expected on what looms, for South Africa, as an irredeemably blue Monday morning.

Whether Crowe will add Sunday’s spark with Smith to the charge sheet is not known.

Either way, the kid’s in trouble.

“It’d be handy for us not to have to face him, that’s for sure,” Australia bowling coach David Saker admitted with welcome candour.

Even so, Saker, himself a spontaneously combustible seamer in his playing days for Victoria and Tasmania, had empathy for Rabada.

“If I played now I’d probably only play two games a year, you’ve just got to be much more careful these days,” he said.

“But the game is so competitive — you’re trying to win for your country and sometimes you can go overboard, but it’s not a great look.”

De Villiers, too, tried to put himself in Rabada’s bowling boots.

“I’m glad I’m not a bowler because I think I would have been worse than him,” De Villiers said. “Maybe it’s important for the players to get around him before he gets close to a batsman so he can tell him, ‘You know what, I just got you out’.

“That’s what it comes down to, except with more emotion. He wants to tell him, ‘I just won that battle’.”

All good, except that Rabada has had five run-ins with match referees in not yet four years as an international player.

“He’s got to be smarter and he knows that,” De Villiers said. “I don’t know what is going to happen to him after this test but if he is around for the next test I think he would have learnt from his mistakes.

“There was a lot of emotion from that last test [at Kingsmead, where Warner and Quinton de Kock had a heated confrontation] going into this one, and as a fast bowler you want to prove things to people and you want to show everyone you belong on this stage.

“Dale [Steyn], when he’s on fire you don’t even understand what’s going on in that mind — you just see eyes and all sorts of stuff.

“Luckily for him he’s never sort of crossed that line.”

That’s the difference between a champion and a chump.

Rabada could be the best bowler in the game, but that won’t mean a thing if his temper keeps him off the field.