We had pretty similar batting careers. Kallis played two more Tests than me, and scored one more run. I batted at No. 3, he at three and four. We both fielded in the slips; I took ten more catches than him. I know how draining scoring runs and taking catches was for me, mentally and physically, but Kallis was also a seam bowler who took nearly 300 Test wickets.
Unlike other great allrounders, he batted in the top order, and was, for a long time, South Africa’s best batter. While South Africa’s riches of fast bowling kept his workload down to an average of 20 overs per Test, he was no release bowler. He had all the skills of a successful fast bowler: swing, seam, control, a nasty bouncer, and the ability to crank it up when the team needed a breakthrough. He was a genuine wicket-taking option for South Africa. If he didn’t bat as high as he did, he could have ended up among the greatest fast bowlers in the game.
Kallis didn’t say a lot on the field and was reserved off it, which is why I only really got to know him when we played together for Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the early years of the IPL. Sharing a dressing room with him, I realised he was actually a relaxed and approachable person, just someone who kept to himself.
I was at an age when I needed to work harder to keep myself fit. After games I would be going through meticulous recovery routines, including ice baths, but Kallis didn’t really need to. He had gifts of physical fitness – just raw natural strength. He told me he did a lot of gym and fitness training when he was younger, and that his father pushed him a lot during his formative years as a cricketer, which seemed to have paid off. His training now was more around his skills, which he made sure he did enough of. He batted, bowled and took catches at almost every session.
He just had a keen awareness of what he needed to do to get himself ready for competition. The way he went about his preparation and his skill work, you could tell he was a person who wanted to set certain benchmarks and achieve certain things in the game, and that he was going to work towards those things.
Kallis might have made it all look effortless to us, but there was a fierce competitor within. He had mastered Test and ODI cricket already, but when he didn’t have a great start to his IPL career, and when he saw how much it meant to the viewing public, he came back a much better T20 cricketer even at that advanced stage of his career.
It must have hurt him that he didn’t have a great first year; he came back with more shots, but crucially, more options as a bowler, and started contributing much more with the ball, both for us and later for Kolkata Knight Riders, with whom he won the IPL. If that was what he did in a format that he was introduced to only towards the end of his career, imagine how good he was at the ones he trained to play all his life.
He was technically efficient, good against all kinds of bowling, and could bat for really long periods of time. There was no apparent weakness in his game. There were no special plans you could make for him; you just looked to target the off stump early on and see if you could get him to miss a full one. Once he was set, it was really difficult to dislodge him. He didn’t make a lot of mistakes through poor concentration. You had to bowl good balls to get him out – which takes a lot out of you. Playing against Kallis was like playing an exceptional tennis player: he just made you bowl extra-good balls when he batted, and made you play extra-good shots when he bowled.
I really admired his ability to change gears when it was required. When it was challenging and tough, he could play defensively, but when he needed to take the game on or put a bowler under pressure, he wasted little time. He did that against us in Cape Town in 2011, when he reverse-swept Harbhajan Singh out of the rough and scored two centuries on a difficult pitch. Twice we went to Cape Town with a series win in sight, and on both occasions he played a role in denying us.
Over 18 years, 13 of them this century, Kallis was the epitome of excellence and high intensity. There was no switching off for him. Apart from the batting and the bowling, fielding at slip requires immense concentration every ball. His mental reserves had to be bottomless for doing what he did for as long as he did. More importantly, he must have deeply loved playing cricket.
As told to Sidharth Monga
Stats are for the 2000-2025 period
Rahul Dravid played 509 internationals for India, 42 of them against South Africa teams featuring Jacques Kallis