The making of Nqaba Peter
South Africa's new spin sensation
“This is a fabulous opportunity for Nqaba. It is a great platform for him to learn,” Paul Adams commented on the 21-year-old spinner’s Proteas selection.
One, two, three. Retrieve. That is how the training session was going. The youngster had two markers at the batter’s end he was targeting with his three balls. After each third delivery, he ambled down to the other end to collect the balls and start again.
The sight of a 13-year-old going through his paces alone in the nets on Sunday is good enough to draw attention, however, that is not the reason why Dave Alers stopped his car to watch. One glance, and he knew he was looking at a unique youngster. Immediately, he wished this was Nqabayomzi (Nqaba) Peter, the youngster Richard Kent had told him about.
Kent was the conduit between George Randall Primary School and Hudson Park High School, where Alers was the first-team cricket coach. “He always told us of any promising youngsters he had at his school and we did our best to get them to Hudson Park,” Alers shared.
The boy was unique. Unique means unlike anything else. He was unlike any 13-year-old leggie he had ever set eyes on. Most leg spinners his age send down balls so loopy they could be Spedegue's droppers. Their looping deliveries are often so high that sail over the batter’s head and are not quick through the air.
“His pace was unusual for a 13-year-old. He had good control and pace with a loop just above the eyes and falling from there. When we were introduced a few weeks later, I smiled and thought, ‘We’re in for a few good years. And we certainly were,” Alers recalls.
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There are many things a coach can teach a young leggie, but bowling at an 85-degree angle is not one of those things. That is something Peter developed on his own. His action helps him to generate more topspin than the average leg spinner. He is quick through the air and gets extra bounce. Batters do not like to take their chances dancing down the track to his deliveries. Schoolboy cricketers barely tried to score off him, they chose to see out his overs and go after the rest of the bowling attack.
“When you look at his stats for Hudson Park, you will find that he did not take as many wickets as the other two spinners in the side. Batters just closed shop when he came on to bowl,” Alers explains.
The coach refuses to take credit for Peter’s development as a bowler. He chalks that to Peter’s dedication to the craft, citing that the spinner has not changed from the youngster he saw bowling alone on a Sunday morning. “His action is natural and he just bowled 100s of deliveries each day. He has always had a good work ethic,” he says.
What Alers helped him with was mental strength. “I used to say to them, score yourself between 0 and 10 for talent. Then score yourself between 0 and 10 for mental toughness. If you want to carve a professional career as a cricketer, you need to be around 80% on the mental toughness scale because on that level everyone is a 10 on talent,” he explained.
Jun Chul Pak, the father of South Korea’s trailblazing legendary golfer, Se Ri Pak, used to take her to the cemetery at night when she was a teenager. He would leave her alone to practice golf swings in eerie silence. In the winter, sweat froze into icicles in her hair. Jun Chul Pak wanted his daughter to develop into a fearless warrior on the golf course.
Alers, who developed into a surrogate father to Peter, did not go to such extremes to help the young man develop mental strength. He employed a soft skills approach. He used visualisation. Before the match, he asked Peter to bowl the first over in his head, concentrating on the rhythm of the delivery. When things went left, he encouraged the teenager to turn his mind to positive reflections from previous successes.
“For long-term mental strength, I encouraged the boys to learn to minimise poor performances to climb the ladder. Then to learn to put the knife in and not be happy with mediocre performances. And to learn to change your mindset immediately on the field if any negative thoughts creep in,” Alers shared.
Peter ran in to send down a delivery. His running speed wasn't as fast as that of an express-pace bowler, it was in dibbly-dobbler territory. Paul Adams smiled as he watched the ball fly towards the target.
When he arrived at his first training session after accepting the job as head coach for Eastern Cape Iinyathi, one of his first questions was about the number of spinners the union had on its roster. The then 18-year-old Peter was one of the players who was wheeled out. Peter was still with the Border Academy and had not broken into the first team yet.
"It was in the offseason when he came, and he never left the nets," Adams shared.
Adams' first impression of Peter was that the young spinner bowled slowly. It's something common with young spinners. Many grow up watching videos of Shane Warne walking into his delivery and adopting a similar approach. However, what they lack are the strong, broad shoulders the Australian legend had. Without Warne's upper-body strength, one is unable to generate the perfect bowling speed.
"If you are not like Shane Warne, you get your momentum from your legs. So, I tell youngsters to first run in like a seamer. Over time, they will adapt and find rhythm and then find an approach to the crease that is perfect for them. It takes time, though," Adams explained.
As he did when Alers first saw him, Peter hardly left the nets. He spent hours practising under Adams' keen eye, receiving constant feedback from Gogi, as Adams is affectionately known. Adams encouraged the youngster's dedication. "Sometimes you have to be obsessed with your craft to grow," Adams shared.
The duo worked on his load up, making sure it was clean and consistent. Peter batted in the top four during his time at Hudson Park, an ability Alers and Raymond Booi, always stress when talking about the youngster. When he was not sending down thousands of deliveries, Peter was hitting balls, something that Adams encourages in young spinners.
Adams did not hesitate to hand Peter his debut when the 2021 season came around. In one of his first matches, the spinner was tonked by a talented Warriors batting lineup that had the talents of Matthew Breetzke and Tristan Stubbs in its ranks. The two Proteas players decimated the Eastern Cape Iinyathi bowling lineup and Peter was not spared. He conceded 46 runs in four overs for an economy of 11.50. In their net sessions, Adams constantly told the spinner that they had a better chance of getting wickets if batters came after them.
"He never got flustered. It's a character of his, he is a fighter, competitive," Adams recalled.
Jono Leaf-Wright, the Lions CEO, can almost recite the words Temba Bavuma said to him when he made the call from Buffalo Park. “Chief, I have seen this guy here, he is a real talent, causing guys issues with his bowling. You have to send someone here to have a look at him.”
Peter, then still a teenager, was one of the net bowlers servicing the Proteas batters at Buffalo Park as they prepared for their series. Bowling to batters most of these youngsters watch on TV is a dream come true for most of the players coming through the ranks at Eastern Cape Iinyathi. Most of their careers do not go beyond Division 2 cricket.
However, that was not the only reason Raymond Booi had Peter on top of his list of net bowlers. Peter was the union’s pride and joy. He had climbed through the ranks at a brisk pace, was one of the players who had been awarded the CSA scholarship to Fort Hare University, where honed his skill at the Fort Hare-CSA Academy.
Booi wanted Peter to test his skills against the best batters in the country. The youngster did more than that. “I organised for him to have a session with Lions coaches at Fort Hare and we recorded a video of it,” Wright explains.
After the other coaches had given their opinion on Peter’s performance on the recorded footage, the video was sent to their analyst, Prasanna Agoram. The former Proteas analyst’s response was in line with what everyone else had said, Peter was impressive and worth signing.
Wright immediately placed a call to Booi and set the process to sign Peter in motion. The Lions put him on a high-performance contract, housed him in a flat close to the Wanderers with access to facilities as and when he needed them and allowed him to train with the professional side.
“Sometimes players fail to thrive after they are removed from their environment, especially at a young age. We tried to give him all the tools and support to help him settle in and develop, and sometimes that is also not enough. Thankfully, it was adequate for Nqaba. His growth has been incredible,” Wright shared.
To say Peter has incredible feels like an understatement. He delivered 195 balls in the CSA T20 Challenge and conceded 190 runs for an economy of 5.85, the best among the top 10 wicket-takers in the tournament. For a debutant, this is outstanding. The 21-year-old was behind Siya Simetu and Beyers Swanepoel who were tied for first place with 21 wickets. He took 20. At this point, we need words different from incredible and outstanding.
But, there’s more. He had the most four-wicket hauls of the tournament and was one of only two bowlers with an average below 10. David Wiese led the way with an average of 9.29 and Peter was on 9.5 was second-best. His strike rate of 9.75 was second to Wiese's 9.17. His semi-final haul of 4/18 against the Warriors was instrumental in seeing the Lions into the final. What is mind-blowing is that that wasn’t his best performance in the tournament.
The leggie delivered arguably the best spell of the T20 Challenge, 2.3 overs of unplayable deliveries that yielded four wickets for seven runs when the Lions played against Western Province. 4/7 in 15 balls. You can’t get better than that.
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Thanks for reading. Until next time… - CS
Thanks for the write up mate, appreciate your work.