In Praise of Keshav Maharaj

He's an unexpectedly effective limited overs player. Kesh could be a handful in India

He isn’t a power hitter and because his name isn’t Heinrich Klaasen or Aiden Markram, Keshav Maharaj tends not to get the plaudits he deserves in white ball cricket for the Proteas. Although a white ball novice, Maharaj is now 33. He’s canny, smart and very effective and he was one of the key players in the Proteas’ come-from-behind victory in the ODI series against that ended at a beautiful Wanderers last Sunday. This podcast is a little praise poem to Maharaj’s often unsung talents. It’s also a preview of the 50-over World Cup that starts in India in October. And we all know what happens when the Proteas intersect with World Cups. Might this time be different?

HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND the Proteas’ exasperating brilliance? With difficulty, I think is the answer, but let’s try, using the recent five-match 50-over series against Australia as our starting point. The first thing I’d like to say is pretty obvious: the side batting first won four of the five matches in the series. The exception to this observation was in game one in Bloem, where the South Africans batted first and, despite Temba Bavuma’s 114, could only scrounge 222 in 49 overs, the next best score being Marco Jansen’s 32 and extras, 19.

The opener, however, was closer than we remember, because, when Marcus Stoinis was out for 17, Australia were 93 for six and the chase was hanging in the balance. This was slightly artificial, admittedly, because Cameron Green, having been sconed by Kagiso Rabada, was allowed a concussion substitute, who arrived on stage in the form of Marnus Labuschagne. This was one of those wonderful serendipitous moments that arrive from time to time in sport in which you can do no wrong. Marnus wasn’t meant to be there anyway and, given that he wasn’t meant to be there, he was given license to fail. 

Playing against a re-assuring backdrop of knowing you won’t be blamed for failure is, of course, a wonderful incentive to success. Marnus duly obliged, taking advantage of his windfall by scoring 80 not out. Opposite him, Ashton Agar scored 48 not out, the two combining for an eighth-wicket partnership of 112. It was smart, no-nonsense batting, although there was no need for hurry because the scoring rate was negligible. I remember thinking at this point that the South Africans needed to be more attacking because they weren’t going to take wickets by playing defensively. Although the Aussies won with nearly ten overs to spare, the three-wicket margin of victory might have been closer than the three-wicket margin of victory suggested.

The batting first and winning template was established in match two of the series, when Australia batted first and stockpiled 392 for eight thanks to centuries to Davy Warner and Marnus, who scored 19 fours in his 99-ball 124. It was a bad day at the office for the South African bowlers. Anrich Nortje, possibly injured before he stopped bowling after five overs, went for 58, and the experiment with Aiden Markram’s off-spin to left-handers like Warner came – to coin a cricket phrase – to nought. Markram went for 78 in his ten. 

The South Africans weren’t going to die wondering and started off not at a trot but a gallop. When Bavuma was out for 46 (four fours and three sixes) the score was 99 for two and the Proteas were up with the rate. In the end, it was all too much for them, however. Heinrich Klaasen, Quinnie de Kock and David Miller scored forties to add to Bavuma’s but it wasn’t remotely enough, as South Africa spluttered to 269 all out in 41 overs and five balls, to lose by 123 runs and so go down 2-0 in the series. 

The South African attack was also noticeably different in game two to what it was in the opener. In game one the brains trust played Gerald Coetzee, Lungi Ngidi and Keshav Maharaj, replacing them with Nortje, Andile Phehlukwayo and Tabraiz Shamsi in the second ODI. For the first time in the series, Maharaj and Shamsi played together in game three in Potch. The wicket here turned, unlike Potch belters of old, witness Travis Head’s ten overs in the South African innings of 338 for six thanks to Markram’s 102 and De Kock’s 82.

In reply, Australia could only post 227, although this needs to be qualified with a sentence or two of fine print. When Mitchell Marsh was out, they were 140 for two in 15 overs; phrased differently, this means that they lost eight wickets for 87 runs in approximately 20 overs as the innings wobbled, lost its balance and finally fell headlong into the turf like a Saturday night drunk.

One of the reasons this happened was because of Maharaj, who suddenly gave Bavuma the control he’d lacked in match two when Aussie scored their monster 392 for eight. Maharaj’s talents are modest. He’s not an eye-catcher, like, say Jofra Archer, or Shaheen Shah Afridi or Liam Livingstone with the bat. You don’t see him coming. He’s like a stranger in the crowd. And, then, suddenly, he creeps up on you, turning one past the outside edge or shuttling one into the right-handers pads with one of his scuttlers. 

In Potch on Tuesday evening in game three, he bowled 37 dot balls to record figures of 10 overs, two maidens, two for 37. Both his victims, Labuschagne and Stoinis were stumped, always pleasing for a spinner. Marnus he turned inside out, like a pair of washing up gloves hung out on the line to dry.

He was the only bowler on either side to bowl a maiden in the match. Not content to bowl one, he bowled two. If you count Markram’s four overs of spin, all in all South Africa bowled 21 overs of spin in Australia’s 34.3 overs as the air went out of their innings like a slowly leaking party balloon. You can only think that bowling so much spin will hold them in very good stead come the World Cup in India starting next month.

Now two-one down in the series, the fourth ODI at SuperSport Park was dominated by Klaasen’s rollicking 174 with 13 fours and 13 sixes and Miller’s 82 not out. Klaasen was at home in Centurion, a ground he knows and enjoys. He’s been one of the form white-ball batters in the world game over the last year, what with gigs in the SA20, the IPL and The Hundred, and it all came together rather nicely for him in game four of the series as he savaged Adam Zampa in a way that everyone in the ground bar Zampa and his colleagues absolutely loved. Hopefully he will play a similarly eye-catching innings in India, where much will be expected of him, Markram and Miller in the middle overs.

Having the security of South Africa’s mammoth 416 for five to bowl to, Maharaj bowled only five late overs in the match, as Lungi Ngidi and “KG” Rabada shared seven Aussie wickets between them as the Aussies were all out for 252, Alex Carey going for an unlucky 99.

He was back with an almost full spell in game five at the Wanderers on the Sunday though, the Wanderers looking pristine in the springtime sunshine as only it can. There he bowled 34 dots in his 9.1 over spell, taking four for 33 with two maidens. 

Only Marco Jansen bowled more dot balls in taking five for 39 to add to his breezy 47. Alongside Jansen with the bat, Miller scored 63 and Markram 93 as the Aussie lost by 122 runs for South Africa to take the series. 

Having lost the T20 series and played some pretty ineffectual cricket in doing so, and having been 2-0 down in the ODIs, it was a good run out against a team who were short of full strength – no Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc or Steve Smith – but who will still be there or thereabouts in India for no other reason that when it comes to the business end of big tournaments they often are. For the statistically-minded a cutaway: the Australians have won five 50-over World Cups. 

I’ll pause now for a moment’s silence, just to let that horrible figure sink in.

For the record, Maharaj was the Proteas’ leading wicket taker in the five-match series along with Jansen. Both took eight wickets, with Rabada taking seven, Coetzee and Shamsi six each, and Ngidi five. 

It’s in the terms and conditions, however, where the real Maharaj story lies. Although he bowled almost six overs more than Coetzee in bowling the most number of overs for the home side, Maharaj was the only bowler for South Africa with an economy rate of under five. At 4.07 runs per over, incidentally, his economy rate was nearly under four. 

Only one other bowler on either side had an economy rate of under five and that was Agar, although Agar’s sample size was small, in that he only played in the opening game in Bloemfontein. As far as actually taking wickets was concerned, like Maharaj, Zampa also took eight of them for Australia, but his economy rate – thanks in part to Klaasen’s mauling at Centurion – was a shade under seven.

The story gets even more intriguing. Although Maharaj is 33, and in the twilight of his career, he has played in only 31 ODIs. He made his debut against England at the Rose Bowl in May, 2017, taking one for 72 in his ten. He played once more against England in the series without suggesting to Ottis Gibson that he was a regular. The following year he only played two ODIs and, in 2019 he didn’t play ODI cricket for the Proteas at all. The gap between his first and his fifth ODI was, in fact, nearly three years.

This was partly due to the fact that Gibson tended to pick bowlers’ in his image, fast men, in other words, which accounted for, say, Beuran Hendricks and a 35 year-old Dale Steyn going to the 2019 World Cup in England, while Maharaj missed the cut because Imran Tahir was the man in possession. 

After Gibson came Mark Boucher, who at first believed that George Linde provided a better option than Maharaj because of his more dynamic power hitting in an allegedly more rounded one-day package. The problem here was that Linde is a holder as a bowler, who seldom spins the ball a great deal. He’s handy, Linde, but he’s no Maharaj. He’s not as deft. And he doesn’t command the same subtlety of flight and control. And he’s probably not as big a competitor either. On the surface of it this seems like a stupid thing to say. Except that Maharaj is incandescently, indescribably competitive. He hates being shown up; he hates going for sixes. When he gets hit for four he gets busy, you can see it in his body language. His eyes start to burn and he begins to hustle and bustle. When he hits a four off a pace bowler he stands up just that little bit straight. It’s because he’s proud. 

Looking back it’s remarkable to think, what with Maharaj likely to be an absolutely key player for the Proteas in India, that he was over-looked because others seemed to be more complete ODI players. Remarkable, yes, but on the other hand, quite understandable. 

Pace had worked for Gibson up until the 2019 World Cup, and, as Faf du Plessis reminds us in his book, Anrich Nortje was a key part of that. The South Africans couldn’t predict he’d get injured on the eve of the 2019 competition, with history repeating itself just this week and so ruling him out of a second successive World Cup.

It all goes to show that selection is an art rather than a science, so vulnerable to the vagaries of bias and perspective. It rather reminds me of Fanie de Villiers, although in “Vinnige Fanie’s” case it worked in the opposite direction in that he was once considered an ODI bowler. Only later did he play in Tests. So enamoured am I still with De Villiers as a swing bowler that I will do a podcast on him in due course.

But back to Maharaj. Given that limited overs cricket is angled towards the batsmen, his grip on the game is remarkable. Yes, he and Shammo, spin the ball the same way, but Shammo has the ammo of the googly and Markram can be called-upon to change things up with his more orthodox off-spin. I’d like to see Markram getting more dip in the manner of Joe Root, but he’s coming on. And none of the three can say they haven’t experienced what Indian pitches have to offer, having played there often enough before.

A glance at the fixture list for next month’s World Cup tells us that the Proteas’ first four games are: Sri Lanka, Australia, the Netherlands and England, in that order. Sri Lanka needed to qualify via the back-door of a World Cup qualifier in Zimbabwe and South Africa will play them in a day-nighter on Saturday October 7 in Delhi; South Africa have just deservedly beaten Australia 3-2 in a 50-over series and the Proteas have the beating of the Netherlands over 50 overs, so a rollicking start is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

A winning start is crucial for several reasons. First, it is difficult to build up consistent momentum after a losing start. In the 2019 World Cup in England, South Africa lost their opener to England at the Oval and also lost to Bangladesh and India in their second and third matches. The bad start set them back badly. As Faf says in his book: “It meant that we reverted to form and went back to playing careful, conservative cricket.”

In retrospect, the Bangladesh loss was particularly disappointing because they batted first and amassed 330 for six. It seems churlish to single out particular players but Chris Morris went for 73 in his ten and the bowlers – Markram, JP Duminy and Lungi Ngidi – who combined to bowl the final ten leaked 101 runs between them. South Africa made a fist of it in getting close but fell 21 runs short as no South African batsman grabbed the really big score that would have won the match and brought others along with him.

Call me a grumpy old misanthrope here, but the Bangladesh loss was also the time in which Gibson started channelling the spirit of Nigerian religious celebrity and television evangelist, Anthony Joshua in an attempt to lift the team’s flagging spirits. The language I’m fond of is scoring more runs than the opposition rather than shouting into a microphone and speaking in tongues. Call me crazy. I’m just like that.

Not only did South Africa get off to a losing start in 2019, there were some sentimental selections. Hashim Amla was poor in the field in the season prior to the 2019 World Cup, dropping a raft of catches in domestic and international cricket, and his powers were dwindling. Perhaps there was a temptation to play him with less experienced players like Rassie van der Dussen and Markram making their World Cup debuts around him, who knows? 

The fact of the matter was that South Africa went into the tournament without their best batter of a generation in AB de Villiers, and Amla’s selection looked to me like a form or compensation or over-compensation for an original problem. Watching Amla’s painful innings against Afghanistan, in which SA only needed 126 to win batting second after Tahir took four Afghanistan wickets cheaply, was upsetting. He scored 41 that day in Cardiff, taking 83 balls to do it. So much for the Amla fluency of old. It happens to even the best.

History seems to be repeating itself with Nortje now not going to back-to-back 50-over World Cups. Could history also be repeating itself with two of South Africa’s best white-ball batsmen not making the showpiece? In 2019 it was De Villiers, in 2023 it’s his former schoolboy colleague at Affies, Du Plessis.

I’m inclined to think not. I can’t vouch for the behind-the-scenes attempts (or otherwise) to bring Du Plessis back into the fold, only to say that Markram and Klaasen and Miller have taken over the batting mantle. Bavuma has come along in leaps and bounds as an ODI player in the last 18 months to two years and the fact that your opening batsman can also keep almost adds one more player to the usual 11.

If I have a concern, it relates to the lower middle-order. Depending on whether Jansen or Phehlukwayo plays as the all-rounder, the batting thereafter looks thin. Shammo and Lungi look like they’re batting with a stick of rhubarb, which leaves Rabada and Maharaj. 

As a batsman Rabada reminds me uncannily of Shaun Pollock, sublime architect of the breezy 30-run cameo but, finally, master of nothing. I’ve said it before: Rabada is good enough to score a Test century. But is he good enough to shepherd, say, Shammo and Lungi over the line in a tight one with 57 needed and only two wickets in hand in the fading light in Lucknow? We shall see.

Being a run-of-the-mill right-hander, Maharaj’s batting gifts are less eye-catching than Rabada’s. As a left-hander the scything arc of Rabada’s blade looks very impressive indeed. He seems to hit sixes as casually as Gauteng motorists shoot stop-streets, while Maharaj is a bit of a grinder, shuffling to leg to get inside the line and heave it over the off-side field. 

Having Rabada at eight and Maharaj at nine (or perhaps the other way round?) soothes my nerves somewhat, though. I won’t say they are fraying yet, the tournament is too far away for that. So let’s just say that they’re kind of pre-fraying, fraying in expectation of fraying at some point in the not-too-distant future. 

South Africa finished seventh out of ten in the 2019 World Cup in England, sandwiched between Sri Lanka in sixth and Bangladesh in eighth. Luck rolled against them rather than for them true, in that the West Indies match was a no result so the points were shared. 

Then again, let’s be brazen and call a stump a stump. The competition was an unmitigated disaster. South Africa won the matches that didn’t matter and lost those that did, thus initiating their inverted, Alice-in-Wonderland-ish approach to approaching the pinnacle of the world game. 

At the Wanderers on Sunday, after clawing back the series, the Proteas won a game they needed to win, which is clearly a step in the right direction. We can only hope.

Finally, as I begin to wrap this up, it has now been officially confirmed that South Africa are an exasperating cricket team. And because they are exasperating they can be astonishingly exhausting. I have taken a kind of executive decision in this podcast to be positive. It’s not difficult to be positive about a player as subtly gifted as Maharaj. 

But it is sometimes difficult to be positive about this South African side, because they really do stretch their fans’ patience in World Cups. As the truly weary also know, there’s a certain weariness that comes from the mere contemplation of weariness to come, because if anything is destined to make you really tired it’s the expectation of having to trample through further deserts of tiredness around the corner. 

Let’s hope that it doesn’t come to that in India. Let’s hope the team can win to begin with because they play the tricky sub-continental teams (other than Sri Lanka) in the middle of the round-robin phase and they might stutter once or twice there. 

England, who won the 2019 World Cup, finished third out of ten on 12 points after the preliminaries were over, winning six matches and losing three. New Zealand, who contested the final with them, finished fourth, on 11 points, only winning five of their nine matches, with one no result. 

This all suggests that there is room for the odd hiccup or two. But no more than that.