South Africa paceman Kagiso Rabada was delighted to help the Kent Spitfires to victory in his first appearance for the club at Canterbury last night.

Rabada took 2-31 from his four overs as Kent defended what had appeared to be an under-par 166/6 against the Sussex Sharks, eventually defeating their South Coast rivals by 10 runs.

The 21-year-old, who will be spending around a month with the club, was glad to have made a positive start to his time with Kent, and helped them to a much-needed win as the Spitfires look to reignite their NatWest T20 Blast campaign.

“It was a great experience”, Rabada said when he spoke to journalists at the end of the game.

“It was nice to play out here, and to start off on a good note, and also the fact that we won was a great feeling. I’ve heard that we haven’t had such a great start to this tournament, so hopefully now we can get the ball rolling. Hopefully this starts a turnaround.”

Rabada picked up the wickets of both Sussex openers; Chris Nash, bowled by a vicious yorker, and the dangerous visiting captain, Luke Wright, brilliantly caught by David Griffiths on the third-man boundary.

“The yorker is a ball I like to bowl”, Rabada said on the Nash dismissal.

“It’s a wicket-taking ball. I just thought: “let me try one”, and it worked. It’s been working in the Caribbean [for South Africa] for me as well. It’s a ball that’s been coming out nicely for me, and hopefully can get me more wickets.

Speaking about the wicket of Wright, and Griffiths’ catch, the Johannesburg-born seamer said: “Everyone has got potential to do something special, and he showed it there. Anyone can do something extraordinary – it doesn’t matter who you are.

“Luke Wright is a dangerous player – who knows, if he wasn’t out, maybe they would have won the game, maybe he would have got a great partnership with Ross Taylor – the two senior players. Those half chances, they stuck, and that all adds up.”

The South Africa seamer praised the efforts of all of the bowling attack, as they defended a total that most assumed would be around 20 runs short at the halfway stage.

“160 is a competitive total, although the feeling around the camp was that we could have got more”, Rabada said.

“However, those totals can go either way. It just depends – if we bowl really well, like we did, we restricted them. We got some early wickets, the bowlers bowled very well, and made it hard for them to score, even in the middle period they were getting ones.

“Our half chances we took, we fielded very well, and it was a good performance.”

The Spitfires move straight on to their next T20 game as they travel to Chelmsford to face Essex this evening, in front of what is likely to be a somewhat-partisan crowd.

KG doesn’t think that will phase him, though.

“I don’t think it gets worse than the Barmy Army!”, he joked.

“It will be a challenge. If the crowd want to come hard, that’s fine.

“We’ll use that as fuel to play even better.”

Kent have named an unchanged 13-man squad for the trip to Chelmsford.

Kent Spitfires: (from) Northeast*, Latham, Denly, Cowdrey, Stevens, Blake, Billings†, Rabada, Tredwell, Claydon, Griffiths, Thomas, Ball