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Rickelton hits century as SA build towards imposing total

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Rickelton hits maiden ODI ton for SA

South Africa win toss and bat first

First game of Group B, Karachi

Listen to BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra at top of page

What is the background to calls for Afghanistan cricket boycott?

by Mike Peter

Van der Dussen c Hashmatullah b Noor 52 (SA 248-4)

Thick outside edge!

#bbccricket, via WhatsApp on 03301231826 or text 81111.

Ken Barrington scored a few as well.

Dizzy in Barking

Daniel Norcross
Test Match Special commentator on BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra

Rashid Khan hasn’t bowled badly today, there’s just nothing in this surface for him.

It’s been weirdly dominant from South Africa, without anything really exciting.

Rashid Khan finishes his spell with two scoreless deliveries.

He has figures of 0-59 from his 10 overs today.

50 up with a six!

Rassie van der Dussen sends Rashid Khan over mid-wicket again, bringing up his half century from 41 deliveries.

Aatif Nawaz
BBC Test Match Special commentator on on BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra

Noor Ahmad has had three good deliveries, everything other than that has been poor. He’s not doing what his team needs him to.

South Africa can keep swinging at him.

Van der Dussen sweeps Noor Ahmad away for four through fine leg between a pair of twos, moving to 44.

The Afghanistan spinner finishes his sixth over with three dot balls.

#bbccricket, via WhatsApp on 03301231826 or text 81111.

Denis Compton, and Nick of course.

Matt near Lincoln

A first boundary in 50 balls for South Africa as Aiden Markram edges Rashid Khan past backward point for four.

Van der Dussen then goes one better, lashing the penultimate delivery of the over through mid-wicket for six.

Aatif Nawaz
BBC Test Match Special commentator on on BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra

This is a little bit of a strange phase here from South Africa, just cruising. They need to be careful that they don’t lose their heads. They could easily get over 300, if they don’t settle.

Meanwhile if Afghanistan keep their bowling and fielding tight like this, they’ve got a chance of limiting South Africa’s score to a reachable total.

It’s been a good little squeeze. They’ve slowed things down and kept their bowling in check.

Back comes Noor Ahmad, and this over goes better for him – just two singles from it.

He almost bowls Aiden Markram too, a delivery that turned hard off the pitch just missing the off stump.

Incidentally, if you can think of any surnames that feature ton synonyms then I’ll take them as well.

There’s probably a couple of Victorian-era cricketers out there called Kingsley Centurymaker and Bob Burley Hundredon.

Meanwhile Rassie van der Dussen adds another three off the final ball of Rashid Khan’s over, with good work done at long-on to save the boundary.

A maiden ODI century for South Africa opener Ryan Rickelton has got us thinking.

How many other cricketers – men or women – with the word ‘ton’ in their name have made hundreds in international cricket? Tests, ODIs or T20s.

We’d love to hear some of your suggestions.

Message us on X using the hashtag #bbccricket, via WhatsApp on 03301231826 or text 81111.

Chance of a run-out there.

Van der Dussen pushes Nabi down the ground and the South African batters set off for three.

The throw comes in from the boundary and Ibrahim Zadran, who has taken up position at the non-striker’s stumps, spills the ball – a clean connection and Rassie would have been in trouble.

Nabi finishes his over and his spell with a dot ball, he’s gone for 2-51.

In comes Aiden Markram then.

He sees out the rest of Rashid’s over, with one further run coming from a leg side wide.

Aatif Nawaz
BBC Test Match Special commentator on on BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra

What a moment of inspiration for Afghanistan. They were looking for a Rashid Khan wicket but weren’t expecting in that way.

Ryan Rickelton will be frustrated to get out in that manner.

Rickelton run out (Rashid/Gurbaz) 103 (SA 201-3)

Oh.

Ryan Rickelton’s excellent innings comes to an end in an unlikely fashion.

The opener steps down the pitch and knocks Rashid Khan’s delivery back at the spinner.

Rashid then wangs the ball straight back at the stumps, Rickelton turns and dives but his bat bounces upward as it crosses the crease and there’s nothing on the ground as Gurbaz takes off the bails.

An unlikely breakthrough for Afghanistan.

‘Wonderful work’- Ryan Rickleton is run out by Rashid Khan

Aatif Nawaz
BBC Test Match Special commentator on on BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra

That was a relatively chanceless over and South Africa still got seven runs from it. They’ll be happy to continue to knock it around a bit as it’s worked for them today.

Noor Ahmad isn’t the only spinner to struggle with his line, with the experienced Nabi sending down two wides of his own in this over.

Seven runs from it, as South Africa close in on 200.

Ryan Rickelton’s century comes in his seventh one-day international for South Africa, and eclipses his previous best score of 91 against Ireland in October 2024. Here’s his wagon wheel…

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Summary

Live Reporting

WICKET
published at 42.4 overs
42.4 overs

Get Involved – ‘tons’ with centuries
published at 12:04 Greenwich Mean Time
12:04 GMT

Post
published at 12:04 Greenwich Mean Time
12:04 GMT

SA 245-3
published at 42 overs
42 overs

50 for Rassie van der Dussen
published at 41.4 overs
41.4 overs

Post
published at 12:01 Greenwich Mean Time
12:01 GMT

SA 238-3
published at 41 overs
41 overs

Get Involved – ‘tons’ with centuries
published at 11:59 Greenwich Mean Time
11:59 GMT

SA 230-3
published at 40 overs
40 overs

Post
published at 11:56 Greenwich Mean Time
11:56 GMT

SA 218-3
published at 39 overs
39 overs

SA 216-3
published at 38 overs
38 overs

Get Involved – ‘tons’ with centuries
published at 11:49 Greenwich Mean Time
11:49 GMT

SA 208-3
published at 37 overs
37 overs

SA 202-3
published at 36 overs
36 overs

Post
published at 11:45 Greenwich Mean Time
11:45 GMT

WICKET
published at 35.3 overs
35.3 overs

Post
published at 11:38 Greenwich Mean Time
11:38 GMT

SA 199-2
published at 35 overs
35 overs

How’s stat?!
published at 11:36 Greenwich Mean Time
11:36 GMT

Batter Runs Balls 4s 6s Strike Rate

103
106
7
1
154
97.17

11
11
2
0
23
100.00

58
76
5
0
98
76.32

52
46
3
2
55
113.04

19
22
1
0
37
86.36

12
12
1
0
11
100.00

45.3 overs

45.3 overs
Bowler Overs Maidens Runs Wickets
Fazalhaq
5.3
0
26
0
4.72
Azmatullah
5.0
0
36
0
7.20
Nabi
10.0
0
51
2
5.10
Rashid
10.0
0
59
0
5.90
Gulbadin Naib
7.0
0
42
0
6.00
Noor
8.0
0
53
1
6.62
Fall of wicket Batter
 (5.1 overs)
de Zorzi
 (28.5 overs)
Bavuma
 (35.3 overs)
Rickelton
 (42.4 overs)
van der Dussen

Klaasen misses Afghanistan game as precaution over left elbow injury

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SA

AFG

South Africa chose to bat.

BAN

IND

India won by 6 wickets (with 21 balls remaining)

KER

GUJ

Match drawn (Kerala won on 1st innings)

VIDAR

MUM

Vidarbha won by 80 runs

Tristan Stubbs was also not included in the playing XI in South Africa’s tournament opener

Heinrich Klaasen has scores of 86, 97, 81 and 87 in his last four ODI innings • Associated Press

There was no Heinrich Klaasen or Tristan Stubbs in South Africa’s team sheet for the Champions Trophy game against Afghanistan in Karachi on Friday afternoon, and CSA confirmed that Klaasen had been ruled out “as a precautionary measure due to a left elbow soft tissue injury”. Stubbs might not have been a contender for the first-choice XI anyway.

South Africa, who won the toss and asked Afghanistan to field first, still had a formidable-looking batting line-up, with Ryan Rickelton and Tony de Zorzi up top, and Temba Bavuma, Rassie van der Dussen, Aiden Markram and David Miller in the middle, and the allrounders Wiaan Mulder and Marco Jansen at seven and eight.

But Klaasen is one of their big players, and the form player in ODIs. In the four ODIs he had played in the past few months, all against Pakistan – at home late last year and then the one in the tri-series preceding the Champions Trophy – his scores were 86 in 97 balls, 97 in 74 balls, 81 in 43 balls and, in the latest game, 87 in 56 balls.

Overall, he averages 44.12 from 54 ODI innings – in which he has scored 2074 runs – and strikes at 117.44. Crucially, keeping the venues of the Champions Trophy in mind, Klaasen has a strike rate of 125.31 against spinners in ODIs since the start of 2020, all while averaging 57 runs-per-dismissal against that kind of bowling.

Among 97 batters to have faced 500-plus balls of spin in this period, Klaasen’s strike rate is the highest and comfortably better than the next best – Rohit Sharma’s 111.59. In this game, against Afghanistan, South Africa will likely face at least 20 overs of spin, with Rashid Khan and Noor Ahmad among the frontline bowlers, and Mohammad Nabi in the mix too.

South Africa’s next Champions Trophy game is against Australia on February 25 in Rawalpindi.

The South Africa and MI Cape Town batter talks about his start in the game, his successful 2024, and about being mentored by Hashim Amla

Ryan Rickelton: “With T20s, there’s a lot more pressure on every delivery”

Players often remind us that Test cricket is thus named because of the challenges it poses, but for Ryan Rickelton there was something more difficult: T20s.

South Africa’s first Test double-centurion since 2016 found scoring those runs easier than the 303 he compiled in seven innings for finalists MI Cape Town in this season of the SA20.

“I grew up wanting to be a Test player and thought that in T20, you can just whack a few, but T20 cricket is flipping hard. It’s different, but it is harder,” Rickelton says.

Invincible Rickelton gives his international cred a shot in the arm

Rickelton’s marathon 259, Verreynne century thump hapless Pakistan

Ryan Rickelton, the new showstopper at Newlands

“Test cricket is very hard, but with T20s, there’s a lot more pressure on every delivery. In Test cricket, you can bide your time and work your way through it at a lower intensity. In T20s, you’ve got to score [off] every ball. There’s always pressure on you, internally, externally, there’s more detailed analysis on you as a player, and against your opposition. They’re always trying to hit your weaknesses. There’s a lot more to it than it seems.”

And it took some time for Rickelton to work that out. While he has largely consistently averaged high in first-class cricket, he had a pronounced blip in T20s a little over three years into his career, after which his average came back up to 25 and his strike rate to over 130 last year. He finished as the top scorer at the 2023-24 SA20, which was around the time that he began to think about how to change techniques for different formats after talking to Hashim Amla, his batting coach at Lions and MI Cape Town.

Invincible Rickelton gives his international cred a shot in the arm

Rickelton’s marathon 259, Verreynne century thump hapless Pakistan

Ryan Rickelton, the new showstopper at Newlands

Amla was once regarded as a red-ball specialist but he broke the record for being the fastest player to 5000 ODI runs and ended his career with the most hundreds in the format for South Africa.

“I spend a lot of time with Hash,” Rickelton says. “He was a phenomenal player and a calm guy in the way he dealt with his success and his failure, so that’s awesome. It’s just hard to obviously deal with both sides of the spectrum, but he was an incredible player and he’s a very good coach.

“Batting is very relationship-based, and having spent three years with him, I can trust his eyes and his perspective as a coach. It’s also nice to have someone that’s around frequently. Even when I move up into the Proteas space, he’s still the guy I call back. He’ll watch [me play] and I’ll toss some thoughts to him. It doesn’t mean that I disregard anyone else’s [views], but the guys that can see little intricacies coming into your game or what you’re thinking behind the scenes are the kind that can relate to you a little bit more.”

Under Amla’s guidance, Rickelton had the best year of his career in 2024, bookended by topping the SA20 run charts and scoring his first Test hundred, against Sri Lanka in December. Suddenly, high-level cricket in any format seemed fairly easy for a batter who wasn’t even sure South Africa was where he wanted to carve out his career.

Growing up as the son of the director of sports at one of the country’s most prestigious schools, St Stithians, Rickelton finished school with no idea what to do next, so he moved to New Zealand to try and play for New Zealand, he says.

“My dad’s best mate worked for Wellington Blaze. He called my dad and said, ‘Why don’t you just send Ryan over?’ I was young, so I went.”

He describes his New Zealand stint as something of a gap year, where he discovered how little he actually knew.

“I still don’t understand why I went. I think it was just that I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I wanted to go to Stellenbosch [university] because all my mates were going there, but I think that could have derailed a few things. It was one of those things where I thought: let me just go have a look. We chatted to Grant Elliott [former Wellington and New Zealand allrounder] as well, and he said [it’s] a great set-up at Wellington – and it was. Maybe if I went two-three years later, I would have probably stayed there. But I was just a kid. All my mates were on this side, having a good time, my whole family was on this side, and I’m 12 hours ahead in Wellington, not really sure who to talk to or what to do. It really forced me to grow up quite quickly.”

Though Wellington offered Rickelton the opportunity to come back for another season, he decided to stay at home and started studying at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in 2016. The coach of the university cricket team, Richard das Neves, the current Titans interim head coach, knew Rickelton from the Johannesburg club cricket scene and took him under his wing.

“I did a finance degree through UJ for three years, played my Varsity Cup, and I always kind of said to myself at the end of this degree, I’ll know if I’m good enough or not. I’ll give it these three years, I’ll be in and around the Gauteng system. I got an amateur contract and gave myself three years to have a full crack at it. And if it worked, cool. If not, I didn’t want to be just plodding about. It was either going to work or it wasn’t.”

It worked. By the time Rickelton graduated, he was upgraded to a professional contract. And so began the journey to try to earn national honours.

He was third on the One-Day Cup batting charts in 2019-20 and fifth in the 2021-22 first-class competition. In March 2022, he got his first call-up to South Africa’s Test squad, for a series against Bangladesh. Several first-choice batters were unavailable since the series clashed with the IPL, so Rickelton played both games and went on the 2022 tour to England, where he played one match.

He scored 224 runs at 22.4 from his first seven Tests and did not look convincing.

“I was just trying to make it work and I had played a little bit of county cricket, but the conditions where I played [Northamptonshire] compared to that Test match [at The Oval] was chalk and cheese,” he says. “I was facing Stuart Broad and Jimmy [Anderson] at a packed house in The Oval on a green one, and that was always going to test me. Obviously, we got hammered in that Test and it wasn’t pretty. But you look back and say, well, at least I got the opportunity. I could physically learn and see for myself.”

Rickelton was ruled out of South Africa’s Test tour to Australia in December 2022 as the board’s medical team was concerned about a bone spur in his ankle. He says he chose not to have surgery for it at the time under the advice of his own physiotherapist, who said he could go two years without having surgery and could keep playing for the summer, one Rickelton said he “was not willing to miss.”

The physio’s advice seemed justified when Rickelton scored four hundreds across formats in five weeks while South Africa crashed and burned in Australia. “It looked like a tough tour,” he says.

He eventually had the surgery in April 2023, which ruled him out of county cricket that summer but also gave him the best chance of playing for South Africa. However, he had to bide his time. Rickelton has mostly been seen as the reserve batter and only got a regular run this summer after Wiaan Mulder broke a finger in the Durban Test against Sri Lanka.

Fortuitously, in Gqeberha, Rickelton was also given the chance to play higher up the order, which is what he prefers, so he knew it was his time to shine. The pressure he always feels in T20 was on him.

“I’d only played seven games at the time and there was that question mark over me from you guys [media] and from myself as well: ‘Can he do it?’ So when I walked in there, I locked in. I was chatting to Hash about just trying to watch players and how guys aren’t sticking to their strengths, and trying to emphasise what I do and do it well for the whole day, if not the next day as well. It was very against how people think I play, but I can do that as well and spend lots of time out the crease and score slowly if it’s needed.”

In the end, he described the knock as one of relief, not celebration, and it was followed by three low scores. Then came 2025 and the 259 at Newlands against Pakistan and Rickelton is starting to realise his life has changed.

“To get 250 is definitely not something I would have thought of, but as I walked off, KG [Rabada] gave me a hug and he said, ‘This is so massive. This is huge.’ And I told him I actually [didn’t] understand it. Maybe you don’t know what it really means until late in your career,” Rickelton says. “It has maybe increased my profile and it was incredible to be part of history. I can’t remember too much, but I can remember the roar for both the hundred and the double. It was spectacular.”

The accolades have kept coming. At Newlands, Rickelton has established himself as one of MI Cape Town’s darlings and his opening partnership with Rassie van der Dussen is the most reliable in the competition. His three half-centuries in this SA20 have been scored with freedom and confidence, the signs of a player who is comfortable in his own game, and it’s a feeling he hopes to take into his first IPL later this year.

“I’m not sure what to expect. I’ve chatted to lots of guys about the IPL and you hear all these things and you think, ‘This is big boy stuff.’ I’m probably a little bit nervous of how the whole two or three months are going to play out. But you never know if you have a good two months here anything can happen.”

That is how Rickelton is approaching things from now on: being open to the possibility of achieving things he didn’t dream of. “I’ve got a big six months ahead. If I can get a bit of the rub of the green, work hard and things can go my way, a lot can change quite quickly. I know I’m going to fail along the way. It’s normal, but just try and balance it out and say, you know what, in the bigger picture, if I have a good six months now, anything can happen. A year ago, I wasn’t sitting near here. Today, after one tournament, everyone says: this guy knows what he’s doing.”

However difficult or easy it is.

Firdose Moonda is ESPNcricinfo’s correspondent for South Africa and women’s cricket

Ryan Rickelton: ‘T20 cricket is flipping hard. It’s different, but it is harder than Tests’

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