Not even Covid can curb Rickelton

Ryan Rickelton overcame his fifth bout of Covid to hammer Mumbai Indians Cape Town to the top of the SA20 standings at Newlands on Saturday.

Rickelton's 39-ball 89 helped Cape Town beat Joburg Super Kings by seven wickets with 25 balls to spare – the visitors' first loss in four matches in this year's tournament.

The Capetonians, who have played half of their 10 league matches, have a two-point lead over Cape rivals Paarl Royals, who have a game in hand.

After the match, Rickelton told a press conference he had risen from a sickbed to play in the match.

"I got Covid, so I was man down for a good four or five days," Rickelton said, adding that he first felt symptoms on Monday. "I needed the extra few days to recover. I'm feeling a lot better. I still have it, but I'm fit enough to play."

At the toss for Wednesday's game against Paarl at Boland Park, Rashid Khan said Rickelton wasn't in the XI because he "wasn't feeling well". Two days earlier, Rickelton had also been absent for the Newlands match against the same opponents.

Rickelton has played in only two of Cape Town's five games. He missed the first, against Sunrisers Eastern Cape at Newlands on January 9, because he was still feeling the effects of the hamstring he tweaked during the second Test against Pakistan at the same ground that ended three days earlier.

Rickelton scored 259 in that match, which South Africa won by 10 wickets. He also made 101 in the second Test against Sri Lanka at St George's Park last month.

"What a player," JSK assistant coach Albie Morkel told a press conference on Saturday. "In the first season of SA20, he came onto the scene as a T20 batter. Before that, if you purely look at his stats, he was… I wouldn't say average, but just there and thereabouts. He's exploded onto the scene with that fantastic double hundred."

Twenty-nine players scored more runs than Rickelton's 146 in seven innings in the inaugural 2023 SA20. A year later, his 530 in 10 innings made him the tournament's leading batter. So far this summer, Rickelton is 12 on the runscorers' list. But his 206.38 is at the top of the strike rate pile.

"Today, it looked like, when someone bats like he did, bowlers can't really bowl at him," Morkel said. "That's when you know a guy's at the top of his game. He scores in good areas, and he's got power."

Indeed, on Saturday Rickelton hit eight fours and six sixes – which accounted for more than three-quarters of all his runs. But the booming strokes didn't come as easily as he made them look, as Rickelton explained: "I had a long hit yesterday, for about two hours, just to obviously try and find my game and my groove.

"Once I felt a bit comfortable, I could be confident, having had success with it in the past. It's important to try and back it up and keep trusting it. But I wouldn't have expected it to go how it did tonight."

Rickelton said his latest brush with Coronavirus was his fifth. "I don't want to get it again," he said.