"You had drop-in pitches in the USA, you never..." - Kagiso Rabada hopeful of high-scoring games in West Indies

South Africa pacer Kagiso Rabada is hopeful of seeing an increase in the scoring rates in the upcoming T20 World Cup 2024 games due to the change in conditions.

The Proteas played their first three games of the tournament at the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium in New York. While they managed to win all three games to book their place in the Super 8s, all of them were low-scoring games. Not only South Africa but other teams have struggled to score runs at the venue as well.

The highest score at the venue in the ongoing T20 World Cup is 137 runs scored by Canada. Even the likes of India and Pakistan have struggled to put big totals on the board in New York. At a time when even 200 runs are not considered enough in T20s, the average first innings total in New York has only been 108.

In their first game at the venue, South Africa bowled out Sri Lanka for 77 runs and won the game by six wickets. It was followed by a hard-fought 4-wicket win over the Netherlands when they found themselves reeling at 3 for 3 and then 12 for 4 while chasing 104. In the third game, South Africa scored 113 runs against Bangladesh and went on to defend the modest total.

New York will not host any game in the competition so far and South Africa will be playing their final group game against Nepal at the Arnos Vale Ground, Kingstown, St Vincent. And Kagiso Rabada is hopeful of the batters making more impact in the game at the more traditional cricketing tracks in the Caribbeans.

"I do expect that conditions are going to level up," Kagiso Rabada said. "Because you had the drop-in pitches in the USA, you never really know how they're going to play."

"And we had an idea of how, a full idea of how they play. And now [in West Indies] you've actually got squares that have been there for years, here in these venues.

"And you'll probably see more competitive scores. And you look at the game between Australia and England, where 200 played 150," he added.

Kagiso Rabada expecting fair competition:

While Kagiso Rabada is hopeful of an increase in the scoring rate, he also made it clear that he does not want the contest between the bat and ball to become one-sided in favor of the former. Rabada said that he would like to play on the pitches where both batters and bowlers can get enough help.

"If you do bat well in these conditions, you can still reach 200. But you want to get a game and find pitches where you have enough in it for the bowlers and enough in it for the batters, because that's essentially what a cricket game is," said the Proteas pace spearhead.

"Otherwise, you might as well just call it batting or you might as well call it bowling. But, the guys, you can't really judge their form on wickets that we've just played on. As much as it's not an excuse, but common sense would prevail.

"And you would say that you can't really blame the batters. But in saying that, no one's got any demons. Everyone's moving forward. We play the conditions as we see them. And on our day, we know the sky's a limit in terms of batting," he added.

After the group stage, all the Super 8s games and the knockouts will be played in the Caribbeans. New York and Dallas have already hosted all of their games while Florida will host three more games before the action shifts completely to the Caribbeans for the remainder of the T20 World Cup.