Suspended KG fights back

The Proteas will be looking to pay a cheaper price for Kagiso Rabada’s ill-advised shoulder-brush with Australian captain Steven Smith as they confirmed yesterday that they were appealing the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) decision to give the fast bowler three demerit points for the incident.

Rabada was found guilty of a Level Two offence – “inappropriate and deliberate” body contact and given three demerit points by match referee Jeff Crowe, which took him from five to eight disciplinary points and led to an automatic two-Test suspension.

But the 22-year-old is adamant that any contact with Smith was purely accidental. “If I knew I had done something deliberately we would not have gone on to contest the charge. I didn’t even feel any contact, I was so pumped up,” Rabada said at the end of the second Test in Port Elizabeth.

While the contact between the two players was undeniably slight, the ICC are known to take any sort of physical contact between players very seriously, hence the Level Two charge rather than a Level One charge which would have seen Rabada hit with only one or two demerit points, not enough to trigger a ban.

The ICC will now have to appoint, within 48 hours of the appeal, a judicial commissioner to hear the matter, with the hearing needing to be held within seven days of that appointment.

Rabada’s legal team will firstly try to convince the judicial commissioner that his two-match ban should be lifted while the appeal is being heard, and their argument that the contact was not deliberate nor substantial will then flow from there.

If Rabada is fortunate enough to be able to play in the third Test in Cape Town starting next Thursday then it will make for an electrifying battle with the Australian batsmen that he dominated so spectacularly in Port Elizabeth.