How Keshav Maharaj made spin sexy in South Africa again

Before Maharaj, spin bowling hadn’t been fully trusted since Hugh Tayfield’s time in the 1950s and 60s. It was what captains turned to in desperation when their fast bowlers couldn’t break a partnership. Or used near the end of a session to squeeze in an extra over. Or when a sunbaked pitch broke up as a match veered towards its climax. But only sometimes: the quicks also fancied a crack on an unpredictable surface.

When most cricketminded South Africans spoke of bowlers they meant seamers and assumed you understood. Spinners had to be freakish to be part of the conversation. They had to be Tayfield, Lefty Adams, Denys Hobson, Baboo Ebrahim or Alan Kourie. Even then they weren’t trusted. They might as well have been aliens from a distant planet.

Maharaj’s arrival revealed the potency of slow poison and its ability to do more than a holding job. It could apply pressure. It could force batting and running errors. It could take wickets. It could even nail down more than one place in the XI.

“Umm, not really,” Maharaj told Cricbuzz. “It was fate that Russell was the head coach and that Faf was the captain. South Africa also had Immy in the white-ball space putting up inspiring numbers. In the Test space, Faf and Russell gave me the opportunity to shoulder the burden of making spin backed in our country.”

The confluence of Russell Domingo, Faf du Plessis, Imran Tahir and Maharaj put spin on the map. Because Domingo didn’t come from a high-level playing background meant he also came without a player’s prejudices. Du Plessis remains the most thoughtful captain South Africa have had. Tahir blazed a trail so bright you could see it from space.

Maharaj also had help from bowlers like Claude Henderson, Simon Harmer, Dane Piedt, Shaun von Berg and Prenelan Subrayen, who built spin’s reputation and value in South Africa. A slow bowler was the top domestic first-class wicket-taker only twice — once shared — in the 10 seasons from 2000/01 to 2009/10. In the next 10 summers, to 2019/20, it happened five times with spinners filling the top two spots once. From the summer of 2020/21, spin has led the list four times in those five seasons. Spinners have formed the top three once and the top two once. Spin in South Africa is now too sexy for its shirt.

Take any of those factors out of the equation and Maharaj might never have become what he has. Of course he also needed to do his bit. Until a particular day at Northlands Primary School in Durban that might never have happened.

“I was a fast bowler then. When I was 12 I got irritated with the coach in the nets. He said something to me about my bowling that I didn’t take too kindly to. I was like, ‘OK, screw you.’ To piss him off I decided to bowl spin.”

“When I first got the call to join the squad I never expected to play. I thought they just wanted to see what I was about. Also it’s uncommon for a [non-Australian] spinner to make their debut in Australia. And Simon and Dane were the two frontline spinners in the system. I was over the moon to be part of something so special.”

Most of that is true. What isn’t entirely is the line about foreign spinners. Slow bowlers have made their debuts in a country not their own less often in South Africa, Pakistan, New Zealand and West Indies than in Australia. But almost twice as many have taken their bows in Bangladesh compared to Down Under.

Whatever. Back to the WACA, where Maharaj was thrust a greater proportion of overs than he would have bowled after Dale Steyn left the field clutching his shoulder an hour into the second day’s play.

Steve Smith charged nearly three metres down the pitch to meet Maharaj’s 23rd delivery. Ball eluded bat but not pad, and Aleem Dar gave Smith out. Understandably, considering his distance from the stumps, Smith referred. But Dar’s decision stuck, with the help of umpire’s call regarding impact. Maharaj also dismissed Peter Neville and Mitchell Starc, and sent down 18.2 overs at the more than decent economy rate of 3.05. Then he hit two fours and three sixes in his 34-ball 41 not out to enable South Africa to set a towering target of 539.

Maharaj was even more miserly in Australia’s second innings, going at only 2.34 runs an over. In something of a makeshift attack of six that featured the lesser spotted bowling of Stephen Cook and Temba Bavuma, Maharaj’s 40.1 overs constituted more than a third of the total.

He didn’t have much success - he trapped Nathan Lyon in front, again by dint of umpire’s call, this time because the gizmos agreed with Nigel Llong that the ball would have clipped leg stump. But that wicket sealed South Africa’s victory by 177 runs. As Test debuts go, Maharaj’s wasn’t the worst. A fire was lit. Nearly 10 years on it’s burning brighter than ever on multiple fronts.

“When I played my first Test my goal was to play a hundred. Because that would mean I must be getting something right in the bigger scheme of things. I never really looked at the other formats. But when I started to be in the Test side more often than not I wanted to play the other formats. I wanted to be South Africa’s best across all of them and be up there with the world’s best from a finger spin point of view.

“People talk about attacking and defensive spinners, but I’m always trying to bowl my best ball — which must be good enough to take a wicket or stop the batter from scoring. It’s just that the field will look different whether what I’m trying to do is attacking and defensive.

“It comes down to the captain’s ability to trust the control of the spinner. You see captains who have world-class spinners but don’t know how to use them. We’ve had some really good captains within our system who understand spin and, most importantly, back spin.”

Yes, gentle reader, that nice, polite, exceedingly well-mannered Keshav Maharaj you see and hear being interviewed on a screen near you is almost obsessively ambitious and competitive. He is not what he seems. Get close to a South Africa training session and you will see and hear someone else — a Maharaj who, in the best way, takes charge and barks instructions, cautionary advice and insightful knowledge at his teammates. If you didn’t know better you would think he was the captain as well as the coach. He is the epitome of the senior player and respected as such.

But first things first. Of all the 1,127 men who have bowled spin in Test cricket — many of them, like Sachin Tendulkar and Daryll Cullinan, are not at all specialists — only seven proper spinners have played 100 Tests. Maharaj is 38 caps away from becoming the first South African to join that club.

While Maharaj was playing his first seven Tests, South Africa had 11 ODIs and four T20Is during that period. He featured in none. Tahir was in all of them. When two spinners were deployed — in two of the ODIs — Tabraiz Shamsi cracked the nod. Maharaj, South Africa’s still evolving spin philosophy went, was for Tests only.

“I had a taste of playing [ODIs] under Russell before the [2017] Champions Trophy. I did relatively well [taking 1/72 and 3/25 in England in May 2017] and then got left out.”

Of Maharaj’s next 25 internationals, 23 were Tests. He was given two ODIs in Sri Lanka in August 2018, when he bowled four more overs at the cost of five more runs to take as many wickets as JP Duminy: two. Duminy was a cut above the average part-time off-spinner, but not by much. Clearly, Maharaj had work to do. Mark Boucher, who was appointed South Africa’s coach in December 2019, helped him do it.

“When Bouch took over he asked why I wasn’t playing white-ball cricket for South Africa. I explained the situation to him. He told me to go back to domestic cricket and what to do there because, he said, ‘You do something differently to most and we can use that in white-ball cricket’. I put in the numbers for that domestic season, and he picked me. I must commend Mark because he kept his word.”

Only four bowlers took more wickets than Maharaj’s 17 in list A cricket in South Africa in 2019/20, then his best season in the format. In T20s he took just five wickets, but at the respectable economy rate of 6.60.

Boucher’s first white-ball assignment in charge was an ODI series at home against Australia in February and March 2020. Including that rubber Maharaj has played 52 of South Africa’s 79 ODIs to date. Shamsi is next on the list with 38. Of the 115 T20Is South Africa played in that time, Maharaj was picked in 54 — the same number as Shamsi, who took 22 more wickets at an economy rate 0.52 better than Maharaj’s. But the wrist spinner hasn’t been seen in a South Africa shirt of any description since an ODI against Pakistan in Karachi in February 2025.

To the list of people in the making of Maharaj - Domingo, Du Plessis, Tahir, Boucher - add Temba Bavuma, Aiden Markram and Shukri Conrad. He is keen to be on other lists making other players, as long as they’re spinners.

At 36, Maharaj is closer to the end of his playing career than the beginning. Already he’s thinking about becoming a spin consultant or high performance director. Don’t expect the AM era to end when he takes his cap from the umpire for the last time. Because spin will need to stay sexy.

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