The First 100
Rassie van der Dussen and more SA20 stuff
If you put the van der Dussen brothers together, they will behave as they did when they were teenagers. They devised sporting games, and almost always, that game was cricket. Through the 1990s and most of the 2000s, their lives were divided between their Pretoria home and their grandfather’s farm. The farm provided them with a break from their normal life in the city.
There is a big tree close to the homestead at the farm and this is where Adriaan, Rassie, Nico, and CE played bamboes-krieket or bamboo cricket. The tree acted as the stumps. The ground did offer true bounce, so the van der Dussen boys decided to create a pitch out of two coffee tables. One was normal height and the other was about 15 or 30 centimetres from the ground. From the bowling crease, the smaller one stood in front and the longer one at the back.
When they played backyard cricket at their Pretoria home, the van der Dussens had two primary rules, caught and bowled were dismissals, and missing the ball was also a dismissal. They felt that a standard bat would make batting easy, so they used a middling bat. At the farm, they made batting a little harder by swapping the middling bat with a bamboo stick. Hence, bamboo cricket or bamboes-krieket.
Whether it was school cricket, backyard cricket or bamboo cricket, Rassie van der Dussen wasn’t just almost impossible to dislodge, he middled the ball more than 60% of the time. When MI Cape Town played the Joburg Super Kings on Saturday 13 January, he middled the ball 88% of the time as he batted his way to a maiden SA20 century. Van der Dussen became the fourth player to reach the milestone after Heinrich Klaasen, Faf du Plessis and Aiden Markram.
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Van der Dussen’s 46-ball 100 is the second-fastest after Klaasen’s 43-ball ton in season one of the tournament. It is also the first century of the second season. His match-winning 104 off 50 deliveries featured nine fours and six sixes. It came during the course of a 200-run first-wicket partnership with Ryan Rickelton.
During season 1 of SA20, MI Cape Town passed the 150-run mark four times and top-scored with 171. They had trouble with their opening partnerships and had only two in 10 games that were worth more than 50 runs, the highest being a 90-run stand between Rickelton and Brevis in their first match. It would be an understatement to say MI Cape Town had a tough run with the bat in 2023.
After the tournament, Rickelton shared that he wasn't happy with his T20 game. He went away and worked on it. When he was younger, that would have meant a complete overhaul of his game. His father, Ian Rickelton, remembers watching him play in a T20 match at Newlands. “He came up with like another whole version of cricket. It was just as if he forgot to play normal shots,” says Ian.
This time around, Rickelton did not tear down his game, he added to it. One area he focused on was the pickup shot ala Quinton de Kock. When you add that to his skillset and natural aggression, Rickelton is, pound for pound, the closest player to de Kock. His half-century and 82-run opening stand with van der Dussen in the first match of the 2024 season was a rallying war cry.
Against JSK, Rickelton picked up from where he left off at Kingsmead. He played a fluent and even better knock at the Wanderers. Unfortunately, he agonizingly lost his wicket two runs shy of his maiden SA20 century. He finished the match with 98 off 49 balls. In May 2022, Sabawoon Davizi and Dylan Steyn of the Czech Republic became the first opening pair in T20 cricket to score centuries in the same match. Rickelton and van der Dussen almost joined them.
The pair’s 200-run opening stand is now the joint-6th highest partnership in T20 cricket, equaling George Munsey and Kyle Coetzer’s 200-run partnership against the Netherlands in 2019. It is now the highest opening partnership in the SA20. The previous highest first-wicket partnership was 157 runs between Faf du Plessis & Reeza Hendricks in their tie against the Durban Super Giants. It is also the highest T20 partnership at the Wanderers. The previous highest stand was 161 between Glenn Maxwell and David Warner in 2016.
Jon-Jon Smuts had a dream homecoming. The 35-year-old who cut his teeth at St. George’s Park as a hard-hitting 18-year-old and made a career there over the next 15 years starred with bat and ball to inspire the Durban Super Giants to a 35-run win over his former team, Sunrisers Eastern Cape. Smuts smashed 75 off 38 and bagged two wickets for 36 runs in four overs.
His performance is currently the best allrounder performance of the tournament, surpassing Andile Phehlukwayo’s showing from the Paarl Royals’ victory over the Pretoria Capitals on Friday. In the match, Phehlukwayo scored an unbeaten 28 off 14 balls and took two wickets for 29 runs.
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Thanks for reading. Until next time… - CS