How a South African troublemaker at school and a Pakistani immigrant who had given up on cricket combined to reduce India to 77 for 6

Stunning 6th over

The Indian batting order read like a who’s who of T20 royalty. But in the sixth over, Van Schalkwyk—the unheralded seamer from Cape Town— startled them not with pace but canny surprise.

Ishan Kishan. Gone. Tilak Varma. Gone. Shivam Dube. Gone.

Van Schalkwyk served one well outside off to Ishan, who tried to thrash it but found mid-off. Next, Tilak was surprised by a short ball, that he tamely pulled to midwicket. And off the last ball of the over, and Dube’s first, came a lovely slower one. Dube froze and tried to check his shot, but could only lob it off the edge to short fine-leg.

The stadium erupted not in celebration but in gasp. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to India. Not in a World Cup.

Van Schalkwyk’s journey to that moment had been anything but conventional. Growing up in South Africa, he was a regular visitor to the principal’s office at Wynberg High School—the same institution that produced Jacques Kallis, one of cricket’s all-time greats. But young Shadley wasn’t following in Kallis’s studious footsteps.

“I hated the first week there so much I phoned home one day from the school to ask if I could leave and my mom said, ‘You weren’t accepted by any other schools, so you aren’t leaving’,” van Schalkwyk told allovercricket.com.

That rejection however became salvation. After a difficult first week, something clicked. Wynberg wasn’t trying to mould him into someone he wasn’t. They let him be himself—rough edges and all.

“More than anything because they allowed me to be the person I am rather than boxing me into being someone or something they wanted me to become,” he said.

With academics not his strong suit, Van Schalkwyk channelled everything into cricket. The desire to improve as a player grew from those struggles in the classroom, transforming frustration into fuel. A year after graduating from Wynberg, he was on a path that would eventually lead to American citizenship and the biggest day of his cricketing life in faraway Mumbai.

Up against a wall

While Van Schalkwyk was finding himself in Cape Town, Ali Khan was losing cricket in USA—or so he thought.

The move from Pakistan to America had come with whiplash speed. An uncle’s sponsorship. An interview at the US Embassy. Medical checks. Then suddenly, a plane carrying a young boy and his family toward a future they hoped would be brighter. “My family wanted a brighter future for all of us, and they felt that we would have better opportunities if we moved there,” Ali explained to Cricketer magazine. “It all happened so quick.”

But opportunity in America didn’t include cricket. At least, that’s what the teenage Ali believed.

“When I first moved to America, I totally gave up on cricket as I thought nobody even knew what cricket was out there,” he says. His bat and ball made the journey from Pakistan, but he thought they’d become relics—memories of a dream abandoned.

With no one to bowl to, no team to join, Ali found a wall.

“I would just play against myself using a wall and pretend to be Shoaib Akhtar bowling to Shahid Afridi. But in my heart, I thought the days of playing cricket properly were over for me and it would just be me against the wall.”

That wall became his training ground. Every delivery imagined as Akhtar’s raw pace, every shot played as Afridi’s fearless stroke-making. It was make-believe cricket, the kind children play in alleys and driveways around the world, never expecting it to lead anywhere.

Except it did. Against India, Ali Khan didn’t just participate—he announced himself with thunderous intent. Clocking over 140kmph consistently, his dismissal of Abhishek Sharma was clinical, but it was the pace and movement he generated in his early spell that truly rattled the Indian lineup.

For Abhishek, they had a wide and deep sweeper cover and fed him outside off. Abishek, never to say no to a challenge, went for it, but found the man. That wicket seemed to galvanise him as the pace kept increasing. The batsmen who’d faced the world’s best bowlers suddenly looked uncertain. Khan’s deliveries zipped off the pitch, nipping this way and that, his pace carrying the memory of all those hours against that American wall.

This was the kid who thought cricket was over for him. This was the immigrant story written in hostile pace. India’s collapse to 72 for 5 didn’t seem a freaky happenstance —it felt more like a statement from a group of players who have taken leaves of absence from their day jobs for just the league stage, as Saurabh Netravalkar had said on the match eve. “We shall then see what happens.”

As the packed Wankhede crowd saw what happened during work-offs, two men stood tall—not because they were supposed to, but because they refused to accept that they weren’t. Van Schalkwyk, the academic underachiever who found purpose in sport. Ali Khan, the immigrant who kept his dream alive one ball against a wall at a time.