Meet Ryan, Proteas' Next Big Thing
Ryan Rickelton is still to make his Proteas debut, but he is one of the bright stars coming through the pipeline.
Two things you should know about Ryan Rickelton. First, he is a bit of a joker, and Sisanda Magala knows that better than anyone. The two are constantly trading barbs and pranking each other.
The second thing about him is that he is a student of the game. Always leaning on the knowledge and expertise of no less than five coaches; his father, Peter Stringer, Matt Reuben, Neil McKenzie and Justin Sammons, to help him with his batting. “I rely on actually all five of them, to be honest. Different coaches bring out different things. They all have their own different methods and ways and what they see with you.”
Now, add Prasanna Agoram to the list.
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The camera zooms in. Prasanna wants to get a closer look at Ryan Rickelton's backlift. It looks good.
Prasanna is really excited by Rickelton, he is convinced that Ryan is the next big thing in South African cricket. It is a thought that he has nurtured since the first day he saw him bat. It was during the CSA tournament in Kimberly. The last time he had seen anything like what he saw then was in 2013 when he ran around telling anyone who would listen that Quinton De Kock was the next big thing. Some people chuckled at the suggestion.
A month after Kimberly, Prasanna Agoram tried to recruit Ryan Rickelton for his Abu Dhabi T10 side, Deccan Gladiators, despite not knowing a lot about him.
“I told my coach Mushtaq Ahmed, 'This guy is going to open the batting,’” Prasanna says. “He was shocked and was asking, 'Who is this guy?' I said, 'Mushtaq Bhai, don't ask me questions, you should just trust me. This guy is going to be a superstar and he is also a wicketkeeper. He will show you exactly what hitting is all about.’”
Anyway, Prasanna will analyse the video and make notes for Ryan Rickelton to look at later.
If you playback Prasanna’s video recording of Ryan’s net session you will see something, a touch of Rassie van der Dussen. Ryan Rickelton is probably the closest to a left-handed Rassie van der Dussen that you are going to see. The Rassie influence is a recent development in Ryan’s ever-evolving style. A few years ago, one might have thought Rickleton’s style to be Hayden meets Gilchrist.
“I used to watch a lot of these guys on TV and kind of emulated that,” says Rickelton who fell in love with cricket by watching Ponting’s Test side in the Ashes. “Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden used to have the bat low or used to tap and so I used to try that stuff like that.”
Some of Ryan's earliest cricket memories are of himself staying up all night to catch the Ashes. Of course, his mother disapproved of such behaviour. Ryan was a kid and had no business pulling all-nighters to watch a game of cricket. But his father didn’t mind that, he understood how much Ryan loved the sport. He is the one who was dragged to the St. Stithians nets by the young boy daily.
Ryan grew up on the campus of St. Stithians, his father was a teacher and Director of Sports at the school. Ryan is a product of the exceptional St. Stithians cricket programme.
“They make them different at St. Stithians,” says Geoff Toyana who has coached two other members of the school’s alumni, Wiaan Mulder and Kagiso Rabada. Other notable players from Saints include Enoch Nkwe, Grant Elliot and the Irish duo of Curtis Campher and Harry Tector.
When he was not getting instruction from his father, Ryan was getting instruction from Peter Stringer.
But, what his father didn’t know was that his boy wanted to play in the Ashes for Australia.
“I wanted to play for Australia,” says Rickelton. “I was so in love with the way Australia played the game and how hard and just how good they were. That was obviously one of the Australian great sides.”
Rickelton’s dreams of wearing the Australia baggy green were a childish fantasy. A phase in his young life. Then came the phase of constantly tweaking making adjustments to his style every winter. The simple explanation for this tinkering would be that he was searching for something that clicked, a style that felt comfortable. Which is true.
The other reason is that Ryan has this inability to settle at a single point. By nature, he is a busy individual who always likes to be on the move.
“I'm quite a busy guy, especially in Jo’burg, to be honest. I hate doing nothing. I'll tear my hairs out if that's the case,” he told me when I asked about how he spends time away from cricket.
It is in this manner that he is similar to another left-hander, former Lions opener Keaton Jennings. Jennings feels that standing still is no different from moving backwards because either way you get left behind.
This is Ryan Rickelton’s mindset when it comes to his cricket. He is always looking for an edge and ways to be better.
“It’s about just looking for those little bits where you can just find another one or 2% which gives you a bit of help going forward,” says Rickelton.
Now and then he watches footage of his innings. He doesn't do it to enjoy the shots, he seldom watches his shots. Instead, he uses them to study his technique, especially when he is working on something specific.
“Sometimes when you’re out there in the middle batting, you can feel when something's off, you can feel if you did something different,” he says. “I can almost kind of check it to that exact delivery, the exact point where I felt something was different.”
Prasanna recounts a recent episode that happened while he was in Abu Dhabi. They had known each other for a brief period at the time.
“Rickelton sent me a message, 'PDogg, do you remember you took some videos of me from the side view, talking about my backlift and downswing? Can you please send it across, I want to see that as a reference.' He has this drive for technical perfection, always looking for ways to take his game to the next level,” says Prasanna.
By tinkering with his style, he was trying to stay ahead of the curve. And when he is not working on his technique, Ryan is working on his soft skills. He has just finished reading Atomic Habits. He is now reading Grit by Angela Duckworth. He couldn’t have staggered his reading any better. According to a study called the Mundanity of Excellence, amazing human achievements are the aggregate of countless individual elements all of which are ordinary, in a sense.
It is a bunch of ordinary habits put together, of which grit is one of the most important ones. The plan is to delve into The Inner Game of Tennis after Grit.
Fall seven, rise eight. Angela Duckworth opens a chapter with that Japanese saying, fall seven, rise eight. The chapter is on hope. Hope is a key ingredient to having grit or becoming a gritty individual. To compete you need hope. In sports, you are either competing or you are not. Champions have the courage to always compete, even in the face of failure. And to always compete, you always need hope.
It is not the kind of hope that says I have a feeling tomorrow will be better. Instead, it says I resolve to make tomorrow better. With this kind of hope, you accept that winning is not final and failure is not fatal, because you are always striving to improve. With this kind of hope, every difficulty or obstacle is a challenge. Ryan loves challenges.
Ryan Rickelton had never thought of things in this manner. Mindset is a thing that he had never considered, but now he is fluent in the distinction between growth and fixed mindsets and their impact on one’s career. He speaks of the need to have a purpose in your career. In this context, the purpose is the idea that what we do matters and impacts other people besides ourselves.
“I've started to look away from the technical side and am now looking internally, you know, what's actually going on inside your head,” he says
This is a new phase in his career. Rickelton never used to look at the mental and psychological side of his game. When he under-performed he looked at his technique and tried to fix that. That is what he did in 2018 when he had the worst season of his young career. He couldn’t get the ball off the square. He had a semi-pro First-Class average of 11 and a List A franchise average of 32.
His first thought was that it had to do with his technique, so he started to work on that. But that did not make things better, it made them worse.
“I was trying too hard to make it better, and all I ended up doing was that I was just digging the hole deeper and deeper for myself,” he says. “I ended up just fighting against myself.”
The season got so bad that he gave up on cricket. What made it worse was that he had no previous experience in dealing with a lean patch. He just had no idea how to deal with failure on such a scale. As a youngster, he had always been an overachiever, played Under-19 cricket at 17. His age-group career was charmed. Nothing could hold him back, not even injuries.
At 15, he suffered an injury while trying to hit a spinner over extra-cover.
“As I made the shot my foot got stuck. I twisted my knee, my patella shot out,” Rickelton recalls. “I was in so much excruciating pain that I'll never forget that.”
The injury was supposed to keep him out for up to 4 months, he was back playing in 2 months. A year later his knee caved while playing rugby for St. Stithians. A long time on the sidelines would have meant that he would miss out on the Under-19 tours. He was back playing in 4 months.
“I went through a strenuous process of trying to get strength and stability back into it,” he says. “It took years, but I like to think that it's fully recovered now.”
The 2018 season presented a unique challenge. He simply couldn’t bounce back. He had no answers and was feeling helpless. No one had taught him how to deal with a situation like this. No one had talked to him about self-talk or the 1964 experiment by Marty Seligman and Steve Maier that points out that it isn’t suffering that leads to helplessness. It’s suffering you think you have no control over. He only learned these things in 2021.
He was doing everything right technically but was still failing. Believing that he had no control over his situation, he panicked and gave up. Before the season was over, Ryan Rickelton asked his Gauteng Strikers coach Sandile Masengeme to not select him for the remainder of the season.
“I put my bag in the cupboard in the garage. I didn't want to see it, didn't want to smell it, just didn't want to have anything to do with it do honest,” says Ryan who went on to travel around South Africa as he tried to map his future.
He completely cut himself off from the game. For four months he did not do anything that involved cricket or training. He travelled around South Africa. Spent time in Cape Town and Durban, visited game reserves and even took up part-time work. For a brief moment, he toyed with the idea of leaving cricket to pursue a career in finance. He has a degree in finance.
“That was kind of the break I needed,” Rickelton shares. “So when August, September, came and I picked it up again there weren't any scars and I didn’t have a burden on my shoulders. I could look myself in the eye I'd say it's time to start again.”
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Rassie van der Dussen is a bit taller than Ryan Rickelton, but they are both big lads with long levers. They can both punish bowlers. We already knew that when it comes to Rassie van der Dussen, and Rickelton is fast becoming famous for that too. The other likeness is that, like Rassie, Ryan stands tall at the crease and crouches as he goes through the shot.
“I think as of right now, my technique, as a whole, might look a bit similar to Rassie’s,” says Ryan Rickelton. “I made a couple of my own tweaks into it, which favour me, but that is where it came from.”
When Ryan made his return to cricket, he literally sat at Rassie’s feet to learn, and Rassie was more than happy to share his knowledge. One of the things that Rassie shared with him was how to approach seemingly complex onfield problems.
“Whenever you are unsure of a situation, just try to reverse engineer the situation,” Rassie told him. “So start thinking of what would be best for your opponents from that situation. What areas do they want you to hit in? Where do they not want you hitting?”
“In my first couple of seasons at the Lions, I spent a lot of time with Rassie van der Dussen,” Ryan shares, “and I kind of liked the way he went about things. So I adopted quite a similar approach.”
Like Rassie, he is also considering moving away from the opening slot. Rassie van der Dussen started his career as an opener, but his then coach, Geoffrey Toyana converted him into a middle-order batter. The top slot was crowded at the time, with Stephen Cook, Alviro Petersen, Dom Hendricks and Reeza Hendricks all vying for the same limited spots.
Ryan’s situation is no different. He is competing for the top slot with Reeza and Dom Hendricks, the incumbents. Of course, the reason is not confined to finding a slot in the side, the middle order is also packed with talent. Ryan Rickelton enjoys the fierce competition at Lions, he is motivated by the need to be better than everyone around him.
“I love the fierce and the competitiveness and the drive to make each other better,” he says speaking of the atmosphere at Lions. “It's such a competitive group that we have, especially among the senior players. If you rock up, you know you're not up for it or something like that the guys are going to bury you. And if you're getting buried, you need to get better. So I think that's kind of the motivation which makes which keeps me going.”
It would be easier for him to keep challenging for an opening spot where he has already established himself. But, Ryan Rickelton doesn’t settle. Batting in the middle order will make him a more well-rounded cricketer.
Currently, he gets opportunities to bat at three at Lions, and he is hoping for more opportunities to bat at numbers four and five.
“I think it will make me a better player, to be honest,” he says. “I think it will help grow my game quickly as well. Opening about being in white-ball cricket is generally the easiest place to bat.”
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Ryan Rickelton allows me a peek inside his cricket bag. There is nothing of interest hiding in a corner, nothing embarrassing. You are not going to find anything interesting here. Just bats, about 6 of them, batting and wicketkeeping gloves and his caps. He has all his caps in there. Gauteng Strikers, Lions, South Africa A and Proteas.
“I like to keep my baggies, your proper playing caps, in the bag,” says Ryan. “I guess I feel like that's where they belong, to be honest.”
It’s a cool tradition of his. Like many traditions, it started because of different reasons. Over the past two seasons, Rickelton found himself going up and down from the Strikers to the Lions and then to SA A. So he started keeping his caps in his bag as a way to prevent a situation where he pitches up to a match without a cap.
But now there is a deeper meaning to it. The caps now serve as reminders of his journey, where he came from, where he is and where he hopes to go.
“It's nice to see them,” he says. “You tally them up and just see more and more as you go along.”
He hopes to add a Deccan Gladiators cap to the tally soon, should they pick him next season. It almost happened in this season, then he received his Proteas ODI call-up just before he was due to fly out to Abu Dhabi.
“This guy is an absolute class act and he plays fearless cricket,” says Prasanna, who is more likely to lobby for Deccan to buy him next season.
“National duty comes first, so I had to pull out a handful of days before maybe four days before,” says Ryan.
Unfortunately for him, the Netherlands tour was cancelled, and he did not play a single game. Rickelton takes this setback in stride. This is the new Ryan Rickelton, older and wiser. He is not the same player as the kid who was given his Lions debut by Geoffrey Toyana. He was a shy 19-year-old, intimidated by the impressive Lions lineup.
“I didn’t know where to sit. Everyone had their own spot,” he recalls.
Eventually, he was saved by Bjorn Fortuin who pulled him to a spot between himself and Stephen Cook.
“I kept my head down and did what I was told,” he says. “There were a lot of big names in there, and you would do well to keep your head down.”
He is not behaving like that in the Proteas camp. He is now a confident learner, not afraid to ask questions or seek help from the stars around him.
Ryan Rickelton is no longer the same player as the one who almost gave up cricket because of one bad season. He has now developed the right tools to deal with both success and failure, joy and disappointment.
“I now just try to find that, you know, that homeostasis level,” he says. ‘I've learned that you take the good or the bad, the highs and the lows. If you don’t, your life will be an emotional rollercoaster, and that is not good.”
Ryan Rickelton grabs his cricket bag, it’s time for him to go and face his friend Sisanda Magala in the nets. He is ready for anything. He knows that Sisanda might have a trick or two under his sleeve, and it might not have anything to do with the cricket practice.
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