Rabada’s edginess in spotlight

IT TAKES a special performance from a special player to shift the focus from the extra special AB de Villiers when he is 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 yesterday 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’s thunder. His name is Kagiso Rabada.

Rabada has bowled better and taken more wickets than the three for 38 he claimed in Australia’s second innings on Sunday; case in point is the five for 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 yesterday.

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 151km/h – and so it cracked off the bat with zeal.

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 was not 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 today is a shocking thought.

Rabada was set to attend a hearing with match referee Jeff Crowe after stumps last night 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. The 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 yesterday’s spark with Warner together with the Smith incident to the charge sheet, is not known. Either way, the kid is 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.

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’.” – AFP