Exhale. Switch off for a minute. Remind yourself that you need to keep your technique tight. Thank whichever god(s) you believe in that he was too fast for you to edge the balls you poked your bat at in the last over. And pray that that was the last over of his spell.

This, roughly, is what would have gone through the mind of any Sri Lanka batter who had had to face a new-ball over from Kagiso Rabada over the past two weeks. He didn’t go hunting for wickets. There was no desperation in his bowling. In the channel outside off stump, on a good length or just short of it, and almost always quicker than 140kph - this is where he lived. And the man never left the house.

The best you can really do is survive him. Other bowlers have weaknesses. Rabada has more than 300 Test wickets at an average of less than 22. He will never stop coming at you. Second spell in the day, his speeds are still up. Third spell, those balls are still zipping through in the channel. They are whizzing away sometimes, jagging back at other times, and you play at your peril.

He’s been around for so many years, and is already a grandmaster of his craft. The only reason it feels weird to say this is because he hasn’t hit 30.

If you looked at his return in this series you might surmise he’d been off the boil a little. He picked up only six wickets at an average of 32.33. Four of those wickets were of Dimuth Karunaratne, whom Rabada took out in every innings.

But take a look at Rabada’s economy rate of 2.77 - the best for any bowler who took at least one wicket all series. In fact, his economy rate of 2.93 in this World Test Championship cycle is the best among its top 17 wicket-takers. Also, Karunaratne is by far the most prolific opening batter Sri Lanka has produced, and has played nearly 100 Tests. The man has made at least five year-end ICC Test XIs. This is not a soft target.

Marco Jansen and Dane Paterson claimed more wickets than Rabada in this series, and both took five-wicket hauls. Good for them. They bowled well, and deserved their big moments. And yet neither was as relentless or as accurate as Rabada. You look through his spells for the series, and you can’t remember a bad one. There was one occasion in this series when he bowled a six-over spell, conceded 33 runs, and took only one wicket. During that period, he’d had a batter dropped at second slip, and at least two of the fours he gave away came off edges. That was as bad as it got.

Some bowlers, it is said, have a high ceiling. Rabada also has a very high floor.

“I think it’s just one of those series where I guess the balls that he was bowling were unplayable,” South Africa captain Temba Bavuma said, trying to explain Rabada’s lack of wickets. It’s hard to disagree here; there was no shortage of plays-and-misses against him.

“I never know what to really say to KG,” Bavuma admitted. Bavuma is as thoughtful a captain as Test cricket has right now, and he’s hinting at a profound reality. How do you instruct a cricketer of such vast and obvious greatness? “All he wants to know is when is he bowling and how many overs I see him bowling. And the rest, I mean, he reads the game.” To some extent, you envy Bavuma. What a joy it must be to have a bowler this uncomplicated to call on. One of Rabada’s other superpowers, by the way, is that he breaks down infrequently for a quick who bowls as fast as he does.

If you are tempted to wonder whether Rabada is losing his gift for taking wickets, please consider that in this World Test Championship cycle, the man averages 17.07 and has a strike rate of 34.8. If South Africa make the WTC final next year, as they seem likely to do now, no player has contributed more to that feat than Rabada. And across Test cricket’s vast history, there has never been a more penetrative great bowler. Among players with more than 150 Test wickets, Rabada has the all-time best strike rate, of 39.1.

It may be true what Bavuma says. Rabada is so good that sometimes even the best batters struggle to as much as edge his deliveries. –cricinfo