It’s a subjective list, but if I had to pick South Africa’s greatest Test series victories over the last decade, three stand out. First, the 2016 series win in Australia, completing a hat-trick of away series victories—one of the greatest achievements in cricket history. Second, the 2018 series victory over Australia at home, South Africa’s first since 1969/70. And finally, the 2021/22 series win over India, where South Africa fought back from 1-0 down to beat the world’s No. 1 side.
In all three series, South Africa’s leading wicket-taker was Kagiso Rabada—which is typical of his impact in Test cricket. At just 29, he already has a case as South Africa’s greatest Test bowler, and if he isn’t yet, he will be soon. Even in One Day Internationals (ODIs), while he hasn’t dominated to the same extent, he was the world’s No. 1 bowler at just 22. And in the Indian Premier League (IPL)—the world’s most competitive T20 franchise tournament—he holds the best strike rate in history.
Rabada is on track to be South Africa’s greatest bowler. But to make it an open-and-shut case, he needs two things. One is out of his control: an International Cricket Council (ICC) tournament victory. The other? A dominant, start-to-finish ICC tournament performance.
The ICC Trophy Debate—How Much Does It Matter?
South Africa has won an ICC trophy before—the 1998 ICC Champions Trophy—but it never carried the weight of a World Cup. That tournament was short-lived, scrapped in 2017 before the ICC revived it as a TV rights filler to ensure a global tournament every year between 2027 and 2031. So, does winning the 2025 ICC Champions Trophy really fill the void?
It’s debatable, but in some ways, the Champions Trophy is actually a tougher tournament than its more glamorous sibling, the ICC Cricket World Cup. The World Cup is designed as a global spectacle, often including teams that have no realistic chance of winning. The Champions Trophy, in contrast, is an elite, top-eight competition with little room for error. If the 2023 World Cup had been a Champions Trophy-style event, Australia would have been eliminated in the first week after back-to-back losses to South Africa and India.
Despite its difficulty, the Champions Trophy has never quite captured the public’s imagination. Maybe having two 50-over global tournaments is redundant, and there’s no perfect way to reconcile that. But what it does provide is an opportunity—one that Kagiso Rabada must seize.
Rabada’s ICC Record: The One Flaw in His Legacy
For years, critics pointed to Rabada’s struggles in Asian conditions as a weakness. He silenced that talk with a dominant Test series in Bangladesh, where he took 14 wickets at an average of 9.00. The last remaining asterisk on his record? His ICC tournament performances.
Rabada’s numbers in ODI World Cups are solid but unspectacular:
- 24 wickets in 18 games at an average of 31.70
- A single five-wicket haul (against Bangladesh in 2019)
His Champions Trophy record is even worse—just one wicket in three games at an average of 116.00 in 2017.
In T20 World Cups, he’s been inconsistent. His 2024 campaign was arguably his best, with 13 wickets in nine games at an economy rate of 6.29. But while that sounds impressive, context matters.
- It was a bowler-friendly tournament, so his numbers didn’t stand out as much as they might in another edition.
- He finished seventh on the wicket-takers list, and among the top ten, his economy rate was fifth.
- And crucially, his 1/36 in the final compared to Jasprit Bumrah’s 2/18 was the difference between winning and losing.
No Time Like the Present for Rabada’s Legacy
For all of Rabada’s brilliance across formats, his legacy still has one glaring gap—an all-time great ICC tournament. Fair or not, cricket history remembers bowlers who deliver on the sport’s grandest stages. McGrath in 2007, Bumrah in 2024—each has a signature tournament performance that defines them. Rabada? Not yet.
But there’s no time like the present. The 2025 ICC Champions Trophy and the upcoming ICC World Test Championship final provide him with the perfect stage to silence critics and leave no doubt about his greatness. If he can be a match-winner in one, he’ll add to an already legendary career. If he can do it in both, it would be almost inarguable that, at barely 30 years of age, Kagiso Rabada is South Africa’s greatest bowler of all time.
The opportunity is there. The question now is whether Rabada will seize it.
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