Surgery alone had not been enough, the cancer had spread. His wife, Bianca, was pregnant with their second child and had to quit her job to look after their toddler while Maddinson underwent treatment.
“By the second or third week, I lost all my hair. I was feeling pretty average,” Maddinson told Nine newspapers. “I was taking types of steroids to manage side effects, but they would keep me up at night. I’d be at the hospital from about 11am to 4pm. Then a sleep. Then I’d force myself to have dinner. I’d sleep until about 1am, but sometimes I’d then be awake until 6am. I found that difficult. I was super drained and felt like I had to sleep 24/7. I felt guilty. I couldn’t do anything around the house.”
“It’s probably as much fun as I’ve had playing cricket for a long time,” Maddinson said after that match. “Six months ago, just to be out on the field and playing is something I wasn’t sure could happen this quickly.”
He was also realistic about his international ambitions. At the age of 34, he knew he may not add to the three Test caps he earned in 2016.
He had taken a mental-health break not long after that first experience of international cricket and then pushed his name back into discussions with productive periods in 2018-19 and again in 2021-22, which put him back in the Australia A set-up, although he withdrawn from a match against Pakistan in 2019 to manage his mental health.
There were other injuries, too, including a broken arm when struck by Jhye Richardson in 2018 and a badly injured knee when on New Year’s Day in 2023 he ruptured his ACL, which meant more than a year without first-class cricket. But when he returned he made three centuries in five innings before returning to his native New South Wales from Victoria.
This brings us to the cricketing element of his call-up to South Africa. Maddinson hasn’t played a first-class game since before his cancer diagnosis in early 2025. He was recently named NSW’s Sheffield Shield captain, but that competition doesn’t start until next week.
From December 2018 to March 2024 in the Sheffield Shield, Maddinson averaged 52.37 – only Cameron Green had a better return in that period for those to have played at least 20 innings – but in the first part of the 2024-25 season he made just one fifty in 11 innings. The lean run continued after the BBL, and he was dropped for the final round of the Shield, although had already started to feel rundown by what he thought was a virus.
The numbers Maddinson put together in that stretch where he averaged over 50 overlapped with the changing conditions in Australian cricket that have made batting harder, so he was making a compelling case to be the selectors’ thoughts.
The fact he scored useful runs on his return to the BBL last season, then a superb century in the One-Day Cup against Victoria last week, were encouraging signs that he could return to that sort of output, but no one could have seen this call-up coming with such little recent evidence to judge from, particularly in red-ball cricket. He has not been on anyone’s lists of potential batting candidates.
“I’m enjoying it as much as I ever have and I’m still looking to improve,” he said during his BBL comeback. “I think I’m probably better now than what I was 12 or 18 months ago as well.”
Then there’s Jake Weatherald. He was one Australia’s Test openers just two matches ago and holds a central contract, but even with multiple reinforcements needed has not been called upon.
In a statement announcing the selections, Bailey said that Maddinson, who has considerable domestic experience as both an opener and in the middle order, “provides flexibility throughout the batting order.” Green is the main injury concern ahead of the first Test in Durban and Josh Inglis, who has been ruled out, has played all his Tests as a specialist batter in the middle order. While Matt Renshaw has been cleared of injury after his blow on the wrist in the final ODI, neither was there any opening cover in the original Test squad.
Still, none of that lessens the surprise at Maddinson’s call-up. And that is also where the two sides of this story collide: the inspiration of his resilience over the last 18 months, but a selection that ranks with the most unexpected of any for Australia in a long time.
Andrew McGlashan is a deputy editor at Cricinfo