SPEED KING
RABADA'S INCREDIBLE NUMBERS
THE weight of expectation that accompanies exceptional sporting talent can (and has) dragged down promising careers.
Few look as promising as Kagiso Rabada. The prospect of 15 years of Rabada spearheading our attack offers hope to SA cricket at a time when it is most needed. Ensuring that he (and we) gets to enjoy those 15 years is not a straightforward matter, however.
For Rabada, the most obvious risk is injury. A fast bowler risks numerous injuries, the most serious being stress fractures of the spine, thanks to the violence of the impact and rotation required to deliver a ball at 145km/h.
The most obvious remedy is to avoid the temptation to over-bowl Rabada.
In baseball, the number of innings pitched is forensically documented because performance declines and injury risk increases once a threshold number of pitches within a given period is reached. So far so good on this front. In his first six test matches, Rabada has bowled only 158 overs, compared to 270 for Allan Donald, 210 for Dale Steyn and 190 for Makhaya Ntini, though the comparison is skewed slightly by one of those being a rain-affected match in which India faced only 22 overs.
The risk is that Rabada will be given responsibility in proportion to his ability, and the stress and load on a young body may, in a worst-case scenario, break it.
Remember Mfuneko Ngam?
The prospect of 15 years of Rabada spearheading our attack offers hope to SA cricket
Amid much hype and hope, the 21year-old made a promising start to his test career but it lasted only three matches before stress fractures in his legs forced him off the field. He never returned.
Rabada may not have the same predisposition to these injuries, but the danger is real — roughly half of fast bowlers have disc degeneration and one in four will have a stress fracture during their careers. Managing the load is non-negotiable.
That said, when you have a player with such undeniable ability, you don’t want him watching his teammates bowl. To borrow maritime wisdom: “A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
Anyone who sees a flowing Rabada in action will recognise that he is not built to watch cricket but to play it. The solution is to find a balance between over-bowling him and extracting maximum value from his talents. Part of that involves the support he is given off the field.
Certain bowling actions are more likely to cause injury than others, for instance — is there merit in technical analysis to reduce the risk? If it means he can bowl five overs more per innings without crossing that injury threshold, then it’s worth investing in.
Similarly, strength reduces injury risk, as does good off-field recovery and nutrition (something Ngam may have paid for). Rabada will be able to bowl more if his off-field conditioning is optimised. I’ve no doubt the experts in Cricket SA know this, but the challenge is control and implementation, particularly when Rabada is out of the national team with provincial teams, and possibly in England.
It is imperative to invest considerable time and resources into making sure all our fast bowlers, not just Rabada, are ticking every single evidencebased box, combined with sensible and savvy allocation of playing time.