It's not necessarily something he bargained for, but Makhaya Ntini must play his cricket in constant pursuit of ever-newer points to prove. With his debut in March 1998, he became the first player to come off South Africa’s development programme into the national side. In hindsight, the country’s ‘quota’ system has worked remarkably amiable, but in those days it exposed young Ntini to speculation that he was bowling on the grand stage on very racial lines.

Five years later came to him the day he still revisits when despair hovers over his run-up. In August 2003, he netted the first 10-wicket Test haul by a South African. “I had waited four years to play at that particular ground,” he says, watching interim skipper Ashwell Prince and Hasim Amla at a practice match on the eve of the Proteas’ first Test in Colombo. “It does inspire on days when you don’t do well. You take yourself back.”

The coming week will test how skillfully Ntini can carry the South African attack in the absence of Shaun Pollock and Jacques Kallis. But as he revisits the milestones of his cricketing life, he exudes the air of a man given to internalising the task at hand and then transcending its challenges. “It’s about how you finish. I want to be a top cricketer.”

At 29, he can say he’s arrived. But the journey out of his cattle-herding community in the Eastern Cape began in 1993. “It was one of those lucky days,” he recalls of his childhood days consumed by the passion for bowling. “We were walking up the road and saw there were lots of cars at one spot. We never saw that many cars together and went to find out what was going on.” Cricket scout Raymond Booi was in the area, and Ntini was discovered.

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