Kagiso Rabada stood at the top of his mark and prepared to deliver the first ball of the match, as he has done 42 times before in his 76-Test career. There was only one thought going through his mind.
"Not short and wide, not short and wide," Rabada told the post-match media conference. "And then it landed top of off and nicked him off."
Of the 351 Test wickets he had taken up to that point, Mahfijul Islam's was Rabada's first off the first ball of the match, showing that even for one of the game's greats, there's always time for a first time.
In the end, many things that have never happened before happened at the Wanderers today.
Bangladesh scored their highest total against South Africa after Towhid Hridoy and Litton Das shared the country's highest-ever partnership against South Africa. All that was after Rabada single-handedly reduced Bangladesh to 121 for 5, and they're not done yet. And even though it will all be novel for Bangladesh, it's an eerie case of deja vu for South Africa. "It happened in the first Test against Australia. We had them 120 [124] for 6, and they ended up scoring 300-plus. I guess it's kind of a similar position here," Rabada remembered.
Less than six weeks ago, at Kingsmead, they had Australia on the mat on the opening day of the first Test. Australia went on to score 390. Bangladesh are on 327 for 6. Does it feel like South Africa haven't learnt from their mistakes or, worse, were too complacent?
While Rabada acknowledged that he "didn't expect a 200-partnership", he quickly shut down any suggestion that the intensity of the Australia series caused South Africa to take their foot off the gas. "That's the one thing that we guarded against: being complacent. I don't think we came into this complacent. We worked really hard during the week, extremely hard, and it was really hot too," he said. "Coming off that series against Australia, that would have taken a bit out of us too. I remember after my first spell, it felt like I'd bowled 40 overs already. You've got to understand that that's just the nature of cricket. You've got to perform with the calendar that's in front of you."
Instead, he pointed to their struggles with maintaining pressure and adapting to a surface many assumed would have given the seamers more. "The Wanderers is not an easy place to bowl. If you miss your length, either short or full, you can get punished. I don't think we bowled in partnerships as well as we would have liked to. That's what you need to do here at the Wanderers. Perhaps we just let them off the hook here and there and didn't string together enough dots or enough wicket-taking balls, especially with the old ball. I wouldn't say we're absolutely happy with that. But we're just in the position that we are in right now and we've got to fight."
South Africa will be heartened by the knowledge that the second new ball is only four overs old and, as they showed with the first one, they know how to get the most out of a new nut. They have also got rid of Hridoy, who recently scored 350* for Bangladesh A against South Africa A in his only other red-ball innings in the country, in Potchefstroom, and who played an innings that showed his class. "He played really well. We threw everything at him. We did. What can I say? Hats off," Rabada said.
While Tanzid Hasan, who shared a 99-run stand with Hridoy, felt the surface got "better and better" after lunch, Rabada preferred to give credit to the batters, who he said "applied themselves, showed really good discipline" and made South Africa "work hard to get them out". He also rued South Africa's inability to use a bouncer barrage in their favour, on a wicket that was a "tad slow", and so "the short ball really wasn't going through with the venom that we would have liked."
Overall, though, there is a bigger issue facing South Africa and that is their almost perpetual propensity to put themselves in positions from which they have to fight back, rather than running with the early advantage. It's well known that the South African way defines itself on bounce-back-ability and resilience but there is something they need to add to their arsenal if they want to keep winning and Rabada knows what it is: "We need to be more ruthless," he said.
"We'll just have a look in more detail and in more depth why that keeps happening. This is the most sporty wicket that we've played on, and that can suit our type of bowling. We're just going to have to look at that. I don't have the answers right now. We have to adapt if conditions are not fully in our favour. It's something that we're going to have to look at with that older ball to see how we can be a bit more ruthless."