“I grew up wanting to be a Test player and thought that in T20, you can just whack a few, but T20 cricket is flipping hard. It’s different, but it is harder,” Rickelton says.

“Test cricket is very hard, but with T20s, there’s a lot more pressure on every delivery. In Test cricket, you can bide your time and work your way through it at a lower intensity. In T20s, you’ve got to score [off] every ball. There’s always pressure on you, internally, externally, there’s more detailed analysis on you as a player, and against your opposition. They’re always trying to hit your weaknesses. There’s a lot more to it than it seems.”

“I spend a lot of time with Hash,” Rickelton says. “He was a phenomenal player and a calm guy in the way he dealt with his success and his failure, so that’s awesome. It’s just hard to obviously deal with both sides of the spectrum, but he was an incredible player and he’s a very good coach.

“Batting is very relationship-based, and having spent three years with him, I can trust his eyes and his perspective as a coach. It’s also nice to have someone that’s around frequently. Even when I move up into the Proteas space, he’s still the guy I call back. He’ll watch [me play] and I’ll toss some thoughts to him. It doesn’t mean that I disregard anyone else’s [views], but the guys that can see little intricacies coming into your game or what you’re thinking behind the scenes are the kind that can relate to you a little bit more.”

Growing up as the son of the director of sports at one of the country’s most prestigious schools, St Stithians, Rickelton finished school with no idea what to do next, so he moved to New Zealand to try and play for New Zealand, he says.

“My dad’s best mate worked for Wellington Blaze. He called my dad and said, ‘Why don’t you just send Ryan over?’ I was young, so I went.”

He describes his New Zealand stint as something of a gap year, where he discovered how little he actually knew.

“I still don’t understand why I went. I think it was just that I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I wanted to go to Stellenbosch [university] because all my mates were going there, but I think that could have derailed a few things. It was one of those things where I thought: let me just go have a look. We chatted to Grant Elliott [former Wellington and New Zealand allrounder] as well, and he said [it’s] a great set-up at Wellington – and it was. Maybe if I went two-three years later, I would have probably stayed there. But I was just a kid. All my mates were on this side, having a good time, my whole family was on this side, and I’m 12 hours ahead in Wellington, not really sure who to talk to or what to do. It really forced me to grow up quite quickly.”

Though Wellington offered Rickelton the opportunity to come back for another season, he decided to stay at home and started studying at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in 2016. The coach of the university cricket team, Richard das Neves, the current Titans interim head coach, knew Rickelton from the Johannesburg club cricket scene and took him under his wing.

“I did a finance degree through UJ for three years, played my Varsity Cup, and I always kind of said to myself at the end of this degree, I’ll know if I’m good enough or not. I’ll give it these three years, I’ll be in and around the Gauteng system. I got an amateur contract and gave myself three years to have a full crack at it. And if it worked, cool. If not, I didn’t want to be just plodding about. It was either going to work or it wasn’t.”

It worked. By the time Rickelton graduated, he was upgraded to a professional contract. And so began the journey to try to earn national honours.

Rickelton was ruled out of South Africa’s Test tour to Australia in December 2022 as the board’s medical team was concerned about a bone spur in his ankle. He says he chose not to have surgery for it at the time under the advice of his own physiotherapist, who said he could go two years without having surgery and could keep playing for the summer, one Rickelton said he “was not willing to miss.”

The physio’s advice seemed justified when Rickelton scored four hundreds across formats in five weeks while South Africa crashed and burned in Australia. “It looked like a tough tour,” he says.

He eventually had the surgery in April 2023, which ruled him out of county cricket that summer but also gave him the best chance of playing for South Africa. However, he had to bide his time. Rickelton has mostly been seen as the reserve batter and only got a regular run this summer after Wiaan Mulder broke a finger in the Durban Test against Sri Lanka.

“I’d only played seven games at the time and there was that question mark over me from you guys [media] and from myself as well: ‘Can he do it?’ So when I walked in there, I locked in. I was chatting to Hash about just trying to watch players and how guys aren’t sticking to their strengths, and trying to emphasise what I do and do it well for the whole day, if not the next day as well. It was very against how people think I play, but I can do that as well and spend lots of time out the crease and score slowly if it’s needed.”

“To get 250 is definitely not something I would have thought of, but as I walked off, KG [Rabada] gave me a hug and he said, ‘This is so massive. This is huge.’ And I told him I actually [didn’t] understand it. Maybe you don’t know what it really means until late in your career,” Rickelton says. “It has maybe increased my profile and it was incredible to be part of history. I can’t remember too much, but I can remember the roar for both the hundred and the double. It was spectacular.”

“I’m not sure what to expect. I’ve chatted to lots of guys about the IPL and you hear all these things and you think, ‘This is big boy stuff.’ I’m probably a little bit nervous of how the whole two or three months are going to play out. But you never know if you have a good two months here anything can happen.”

That is how Rickelton is approaching things from now on: being open to the possibility of achieving things he didn’t dream of. “I’ve got a big six months ahead. If I can get a bit of the rub of the green, work hard and things can go my way, a lot can change quite quickly. I know I’m going to fail along the way. It’s normal, but just try and balance it out and say, you know what, in the bigger picture, if I have a good six months now, anything can happen. A year ago, I wasn’t sitting near here. Today, after one tournament, everyone says: this guy knows what he’s doing.”

However difficult or easy it is.