An Oddsworth Opinion
The innings Australia are asking Nic Maddinson to live on
The story
Australia called Nic Maddinson into their Test squad and, with Cameron Green ruled out of the first Test in Durban by an abdominal strain, the 34-year-old left-hander looks set to play, possibly as an opener. He last played a Test in 2016, has recovered from testicular cancer and made a one-day hundred for New South Wales last month.
Nic Maddinson looks set to take Cameron Green's place in Australia's first Test against South Africa at Kingsmead, possibly as an opener, after Green was ruled out with an abdominal strain. The left-hander is 34 and last played a Test on Boxing Day 2016.
The gap that matters is a shorter one. If Maddinson plays on 9 October, 582 days will have passed since his last first-class match. Of every player Australia have picked for a Test since 2018, the longest such wait was Jon Holland's 560 days in October 2018. Australia are about to ask a batter with a longer lay-off than that to face a new ball.
The batter the selectors remember
Chief selector George Bailey has sold the pick on flexibility, and coach Andrew McDonald says Maddinson can bat at the top or in the middle. With Alex Carey staying at No. 6, the vacancy is Green's and the role is whichever the selectors fancy.
McDonald's case rests on memory, and the memory is a fair one. He called Maddinson one of the leading players in Shield cricket from 2018 to 2024, and across the Sheffield Shield seasons from 2018/19 to 2023/24 the left-hander averaged 51.6. He signed off from Victoria with a hundred in three of his last four matches of 2023/24. They are the wrong innings to judge Durban on, because a full Shield season followed.
The season Australia cannot skip
In his most recent Shield season, 2024/25 for New South Wales, Maddinson averaged 17.8. He did not reach 40 in his last eight Shield innings, and his final first-class match, against Western Australia in March 2025, brought scores of 4 and 0.
A season like that normally costs a batter his state place. The selectors can put him anywhere in the order, but they cannot point to a recent first-class innings that says he deserves the spot. Opening sharpens the problem, because the new ball is the least forgiving place to find out whether the decline has stopped.
All seasons 40.4
Runs against the white ball
Maddinson has come back after recovering from testicular cancer, and his cricket since that last Shield match has all been with the white ball. For Sydney Thunder in the Big Bash he made 128 runs in five innings, and this season's One-Day Cup for New South Wales began with 14 against Queensland.
Then came the innings that caught the selectors' eye: 126 off 127 balls against Victoria on 25 September. It was a proper innings, and it is easy to see why it carried weight. It answers a different question from the one Durban will ask. Opening in a Test is about leaving, defending and surviving the first hour against a hard new ball, and nothing Maddinson has played since March 2025 has tested that.
The coach's own test points to Connolly
When McDonald was asked about Cooper Connolly, he said runs were the critical piece for a top-order batter. Apply that test to the squad and it points away from Maddinson. Connolly, a Western Australia left-hander with one Test behind him, has averaged 44.7 across the last two Shield seasons, set against Maddinson's 17.8 in 2024/25, the only one of those two seasons he played.
Connolly's split is uneven, 69.0 in 2024/25 and then 30.9 last summer, and a single Test at Galle in February 2025 is his only taste of the level. Even so, he has made first-class runs this year, and the coach's yardstick asks for nothing more.
Sam Harper arrived as cover for the injured keeper Josh Inglis rather than as a batting option. His 677 runs for Victoria in 2025/26 were the second-most in the Shield, though over the two seasons he averages 30.3. His case is thinner than Connolly's, but it rests on recent red-ball runs, which the man set to play cannot offer.
Should Maddinson have made the squad at all?
The harder question sits behind the Green injury. Jason Sangha of South Australia has averaged 49.0 in the Shield over the last two seasons, the best of any batter outside the Test squad with 1,000 runs in that time. Kurtis Patterson, Maddinson's New South Wales team-mate, has a Test hundred from 2019 and averaged 45.4 over the same two seasons.
McDonald has credited Maddinson with good craft against spin, and the recent record does not back him. Since 2022/23 he has averaged 24.2 against spin in the Shield, while Sangha has averaged 69.0 against the slow bowlers over the same period. Put another way, spinners have got Sangha out eight times in 1,022 balls. If playing spin was part of the case for recalling Maddinson, the selectors have passed over the batter who barely gives spinners a wicket.
The call for Durban
Green's injury has given Bailey's flexibility a job to do, and the one-day hundred has given the selectors something recent to admire. Neither is what a Test opener is picked for. Connolly has the Shield runs the coach says he wants, and Sangha had the stronger claim to the squad place.
Picking Maddinson for the first Test is not defensible. If he walks out at Kingsmead, Australia will be asking a batter to live on the selectors' memory of him.