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
Firdose Moonda08-Feb-20256:28
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.Related
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“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.Related
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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.”Rickelton’s 259 against Pakistan is the joint seventh-highest Test score for South Africa•Rodger Bosch /AFP/Getty ImagesHe 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.Rickelton (seated, first from right) was part of the South African side that reached the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup final•Matthew Lewis/ICC/Getty ImagesHe 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.In three SA20 seasons so far, Rickelton has scored nearly 1000 runs at a strike rate of 161.28•SA20″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.