When Maharaj ruptured his Achilles at the Wanderers on March 11, while celebrating a successful review in a Test against West Indies, his place in the World Cup squad seemed just as damaged. Coming back from that injury could take nine months, or 274 days.
Thanks to innovative surgery and rehabilitation techniques, family support and his own near obsession with recovery, Maharaj was back on the park 177 days after he had left it on his back and strapped to a golf cart. That's a difference of 97 days - more than three months, enough for him to not only be available for the World Cup but to play in the current series against Australia.
The ODI component of the Australians' visit reached the fourth of five games at Centurion on Friday. Nortje - whose originally stated "lower back spasm" was upgraded to a "lower back injury" in a CSA release - and Bavuma were ruled out; Nortje also for Sunday's finale at the Wanderers. Magala bowled four overs in the third match of the series in Potchefstroom on Tuesday and hasn't been seen since. Team management said De Kock hadn't been done a significant nasty - twice the ball crashed into the same unprotected part of his inner thigh - but he didn't look comfortable at the crease. Ngidi left the field after bowling his eighth over but management said cramp was the cause.
That wasn't Friday's only subplot. With timing that was at best inconvenient and at worst rude - an hour after the ODI started - the SA20 released a list of 122 shortlisted players who had put themselves up for auction for next year's tournament. Included were Kyle Verreynne, Zubayr Hamza, Tony de Zorzi, Stiaan van Zyl, Keegan Petersen, Lutho Sipamla, Duanne Olivier, Khaya Zondo and Dean Elgar.
In March last year, after CSA had told IPL-contracted players to choose between going to the tournament or making themselves available for selection for two home Tests against Bangladesh, the same Dean Elgar, then South Africa's captain, said "we'll see where [the players'] loyalty lies". We did: Rassie van der Dussen, Aiden Markram, Kagiso Rabada, Ngidi, Marco Jansen and Nortje all went to the IPL.
Here we go again. The SA20 will be played from January 10 to February 10. South Africa are due in New Zealand for two Tests from February 4 to 17. All of those dates appear to be set in stone. This time CSA, the majority shareholders in Africa Cricket Development, which owns the SA20, haven't left the choice to the players. "Because of our contractual obligations to the SA20, and because I've bet and CSA have bet everything on the SA20, we have to guarantee players for the SA20," Pholetsi Moseki, CSA's chief executive, told Cricbuzz in July. The logic is unimpeachable: the SA20 makes money, Test cricket loses money, and without money there is no cricket.
To the list of auctionees above who have a serious chance of being picked in the squad for New Zealand if they don't snag a deal in the SA20, add some of those who are already on the six franchises' books and therefore already unavailable for the Tests: Markram, Bavuma, Van der Dussen, Maharaj, Rabada, Nortje, Jansen, Ngidi, Prenelan Subrayen, Wiaan Mulder, Tabraiz Shamsi, Gerald Coetzee, Lizaad Williams, Theunis de Bruyn, Wayne Parnell, Beuran Hendricks, George Linde, Simon Harmer, Sarel Erwee and Heinrich Klaasen. Scary stuff if you're Shukri Conrad, who will have to pick the Test squad.
Conrad might be particularly sorry not to be able to select Klaasen, who improved somewhat on his performance on Tuesday, when he swept at the second ball he faced, bowled by Travis Head, and was trapped in front. "I had a shocker of a day in Potch, so it's lekker [nice] to bounce back immediately," Klaasen, ever the understater, told a television interviewer between innings.
Sweat flowed from his brow and everything else as he spoke. It had been raised by him scoring - if we start on the superlatives we'll never finish - a career-best 174 off 83 with 13 sixes and as many fours. That's a touch under 75% of his runs smote in boundaries. Most of Klaasen's runs came in a stand of 222 of 94 with David Miller, whose mere 82 not out came off 45. Klaasen reached 50 off 38 deliveries and needed only 19 more to convert his half-century.
South Africa had ambled to 120/3 a ball into the second half of their innings when Klaasen took guard. They made 296 more runs to finish with 416/5 - the highest ODI total at this ground and their second-highest anywhere against Australia. Never in the 4,646 ODIs yet played have as many runs been scored in the last 10 overs of the innings as South Africa's 173 on Friday.
Adam Zampa's 10 wicketless overs went for 113, equalling the world record hung around Mick Lewis' neck in the 438 game at the Wanderers in March 2006 for the most runs conceded in an ODI innings. Josh Hazlewood's 2/79 surpassed his 0/74 on Tuesday for his most expensive in his 72 matches in the format.
Klaasen's hitting, as sweet as a nut and twice as crunchy, was mostly into the arc between mid-on and midwicket. That made his forays to the off side all the more memorable, most of all the six he smacked off Hazlewood in the 47th - Klaasen, bent at the knees and the waist to reach a widening yorker, somehow found the power to send the ball screaming over deep third.
"You look up to some role models and you want to be like them, like AB de Villiers," Klaasen told a press conference. "You try to play all the shots and you do all the work on all the shots. But the genius behind him is knowing when to play the shots. I've explored this a lot, and I've had to take a lot of options out of the bag. It's about maturing into my gameplan.
"What changed in my career in the last couple of years is playing every ball as it is and taking what's on offer. I don't recap on what I've done the previous ball. Tim David asked me how many sixes I hit, and I don't know. That shows that my mindset is in a good space - I'm only focusing on what's coming at that moment.
"You dream about these innings, where you hit everyone to all parts of the ground. You don't get innings like this everyday. This is why I dream big and why I put in the hard work. I bat within myself at the start to make sure I get a good platform, and then I try to react to every ball - stand still and watch the ball, and wherever I need to hit it my body will take over and react."
Besides the hours of toil, what else had helped him hone his game? "I've got a lot of good friends who are very hard on me, and that keeps me humble. When you screw up they let you know about it, so you have to go and put in the hard work. And when you do well they congratulate you and have a drink with you to celebrate your success."
That and being able to leave cricket on the field, where it belongs, and not take it home to his wife, Sone Klaasen, and their nine-month-old daughter, Laya: "Having a family has changed things big time for me. The little one doesn't care what I did tonight. I saw she's awake, so it might be a long night."
Like it was for the Australians, whose reply went through the motions of trying to stay in touching distance of an asking rate of, originally, 8.34. That had crept 0.31 higher after 10 overs and 0.4 five overs later. But, three balls after that, they were four down. On top of that Head had left the scene in the ninth because of a blow to the hand delivered by Coetzee. Head was taken to hospital for scans, which Andrew McDonald said after the match revealed a fracture. Further tests will be conducted on Saturday to determine the extent of the injury. Perhaps Head will also need Maharaj's services. Perhaps Marnus Labuschagne will be at the World Cup after all.
Ngidi bowled with impressive control and composure to dismiss David Warner and Mitchell Marsh with the new ball, and returned to deal with Tim Davis and Nathan Ellis.
Alex Carey kept the Australians in it, theoretically, but they were effectively eight down after 32 overs when the required rate had nudged into double figures. Seventeen balls later the visitors were dismissed 164 runs shy when Carey gloved Rabada to a diving De Kock. He batted well enough to score a century but the scorebook will always say 99.
So to Sunday's decider, which has been given relevance by the home side's rediscovery this week of how to play competitive cricket this week. But, whatever happens at the Wanderers, the injuries, the coming World Cup and the fixture clash will loom larger on South Africa's horizon. In this country it's never only about, or even mainly about, what's happening on the field.
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