'I want to be the player who stands up when it's 40 degrees and it's flat'

Pace is pace, boet.

While the modern bowler is interested in developing a slower ball or learning the art of reverse swing, for Anrich Nortje, speed is key to his craft.

"Pace, especially for me, is crucial," Nortje says from his family farm in the Eastern Cape during South Africa's Covid-19 lockdown. "When you don't have the pace, you have to focus so much on skill because it's so difficult to teach someone pace at a later stage in their career."

So pace was always Nortje's baseline and the rest, like control and consistency, came later.

By the time he began to focus on technique, he had been bowling for several years, had played for age-group provincial sides, and had had a smorgasbord of injuries. He was 17 when he broke his collarbone and came to the realisation that "my body wasn't really built for rugby". At 1.88 metres tall and with a wiry frame, Nortje had more fast-twitch fibre than big muscle, which steered him towards bowling.

He made his first-class debut in 2013, in Namibia, where he opened the bowling and took a wicket in his second over. He was 19, "quite shy and reserved", according to his team-mate Jon-Jon Smuts, "but he had white-line fever". He was also very proud of his Afrikaans background, a quality that was immediately evident. "I think the most English music he listened to was Jack Parow," Smuts said.

Afrikaans rapper Parow makes what he calls "dangerous" music that stings with satire, while wearing a leopard-print peak cap with a ridiculously long visor, a 70s 'tache and a smirk. What might someone like that have in common with Nortje? "It's a never-say-die, never-stop-fighting attitude," Nortje says, when asked what underpins Afrikaans culture.

A self-styled "proper Dutchman", Nortje, like Parow, wants to be someone who stands out. "When times are tough, I want to put my hand up and try and make a change," he said. "I want to be the player that stands up when it's 40 degrees and it's flat. That's how I see it.'

In his first full season as an international, Nortje achieved exactly that. During one of the tougher periods in South African cricket, in which they won only one of five home series, he was one of the bright spots. Nortje was South Africa's highest wicket-taker of the 2019-20 summer, and has one of the best strike rates among ODI bowlers since January 2019. To the international cricket community, he surged onto the scene overnight, but his bowling was a product many years in the making.

Between November 2013 and November 2015, he went through a revolving door of injuries and used the time to concentrate on his studies. Knowing that international sport can be a precarious career path, he embarked on a Bachelor of Commerce degree and a postgraduate programme in financial planning while he worked his way back to bowling.

Nortje needed to figure out a way to keep bowling quickly for sustained periods of time while minimising the risk of hurting himself. That's where Eastern Province coach (and later coach of the Warriors franchise) Piet Botha, and Drikus Saaiman, the Warriors' strength and conditioning coach, came in. They embarked on what became a three-year process to get Nortje into good positions at the crease.

"The main thing in the last year was to have all the power at the crease, so we looked at everything from a braced front leg to a strong front arm and a good hip drive," Nortje explained. "I did a lot of training with Drikus to understand how the body works and how certain things feel when you do certain movements, especially the hip drive."

Being able to bring the back hip forward when landing on the crease is key to making a bowler's action more front-on, which is easier on the body, and so more sustainable. Nortje started to get it right in the 2017-18 season, when he was the highest wicket-taking out-and-out fast-bowler in South Africa's first-class competition behind three spinners and a medium-pacer. He had become the go-to-guy for Smuts, who was now Warriors captain. He "expressed himself by getting wickets", and had gained a reputation as the quickest bowler on the domestic scene, which was suffering from something of a go-slow.

Given his gas, Nortje knew he would stand out. "If I look back a few years, in domestic cricket, we had a couple of guys in each team who could bowl 140 or 150kph, but it changed so much. You hardly have guys who bowl 140-plus now, and so anyone who gets to is always being looked at," Nortje said.

Cobras coach Ashwell Prince was one of those doing the looking and he picked Nortje up in the fifth round of the inaugural Mzansi Super League draft for R350,000 (approx US$19,400) for Cape Town Blitz. Technically Nortje made nearly R29,166 an over, because he only delivered 12 of them before he broke a bone in his ankle and was ruled out of the rest of the tournament.

But Nortje had made a massive impression in the three matches he played, taking 8 for 83 all told, including four wickets in nine balls against Durban Heat. There, he counted Hashim Amla and Temba Bavuma among his victims. He clocked speeds of 150kph, enough to secure an IPL deal. Less than a month after he underwent surgery, while shopping for meat for a braai he found out he had been picked for the Kolkata Knight Riders for R400,000 ($21,500) in the December 2018 auction. When asked about the thought of bowling to Virat Kohli, Nortje said it would be "wow."

And it was - but not the way Nortje might have thought it would be. He injured his shoulder and never made it to the IPL. He had to wait until South Africa's September 2019 tour to India before he came up against Kohli, on T20I debut in Mohali. Kohli faced six balls from him, among them a short-ball and a yorker, and didn't score any boundaries, but he finished unbeaten on 72 as India beat South Africa by seven wickets. Three weeks later, Nortje made his Test debut in Pune and Kohli scored an unbeaten 254 as India won by an innings and 137 runs. Nortje bowled 25 overs and went wicketless, conceding a century of runs. Wow.

By then Nortje had understood the roller coaster that is international cricket more than most rookies. He had been picked for the World Cup squad but broke his thumb, soon after he recovered from the shoulder injury that kept him out of the IPL. That happened in the nets a couple of weeks before the squad's departure for England, but he managed to see the bright side. "I had just got married and would have had to leave for the World Cup the day after my wedding, so it actually worked out quite well. It was nice to be at home just after the wedding and spend some quality time together."

Micaela, a teacher, was Nortje's high-school sweetheart and became a popular fixture in the second edition of the MSL, where television cameras couldn't get enough of her supporting him in the stands. That tournament came as a relief at a particularly dark time for South African cricket, when the administration crumbled and, over the course of ten mad days in December, everything changed. A new coaching regime was installed and they saw a big role for Nortje in the home summer.

With Lungi Ngidi out of the England Tests, Nortje would be the third prong in the pace pack, and he finished as the leading wicket-taker in the series. But it was his other job, of nightwatchman, that gave him more joy. "My first five-for (at the Wanderers) was really special but my favourite moment was in the first game, when I helped the team with the bat," he said.

Nortje batted for two hours and seven minutes in the first Test, in Centurion, scored 40 and starred in a match-winning partnership with Rassie van der Dussen, proving that his scores of significance at first-class level were not flukes. "At provincial level he always liked to play a few shots but he has a few 60s and 70s to his name," Smuts said. "It was really great to see him do that for South Africa."

While South Africa won the Centurion Test, they went on to lose the series 1-3 and are still in a rebuilding phase. "It's a culture of learning because everyone is quite new to international cricket. There's a lot of young guys coming through and a lot of young guys in senior positions," Nortje said. "It's about trying to stick to the basics of what the guys have done in the past and learning and understanding where we fit in now."

For Nortje, being the fast man remains his forte and he sees himself as the person to turn up the heat when South Africa are in the field. "When I try and put some extra effort in and see the speed gun and the ball flies through, that just gets a little bit of blood flowing again. It feels like it makes things interesting and you can do things you didn't think you were able to. And then you can work on some extra stuff when you have the pace."

Those extras are what Nortje needs to develop to take his game to the next level, something Botha has usually overseen, but is now the domain of bowling coach, Charl Langeveldt. Botha remains a close confidante and mentor to Nortje. "Pace is the No. 1 thing because it makes people sit up and take notice," he said, "but great players have other skills as well. They can bowl in gears and when they sniff something, they just step it up."

So pace may be pace, boet, but Nortje is discovering there's a lot more to bowling besides.